Lawless (72 page)

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.”

“Yes, a first-rate job given his state of mind lately. It’s obvious the text and the illustrations were done by men who love this country.”

“Nonsense, Dana. I don’t love America. How can you love a nation of poltroons and parvenues? All I’ll say is that, visually, it’s an incredible place.”

“You know, don’t you, that the ancients believed love entered through the eye?”

Somehow the teasing infuriated Matt, but he said nothing. Hughes stood, stretched, and Matt heard one of the older man’s knees pop.

“Did your brother say whether he’d be taking the train up here to supervise the press run?”

“I think he meant to do that, but that railroad strike heated up and he raced off to have a look.”

Hughes shook his head. “Running about like one of his own news cubs—I’ve never thought that was advisable. For one thing it’s undignified. For another, that’s a very troubled situation in West Virginia. Your brother shouldn’t thoughtlessly rush into danger. He’s the head of two companies now. Quite a few people depend on him for decisions—and for jobs. He should think of that before he goes places where he might be accidentally injured or killed.”

Perhaps it was exhaustion, or the fact that it was the end of the night, the time of sad thoughts and bad dreams, that suddenly put a terrible realization into Matt’s head:
Maybe that’s what he hopes for now. Maybe things have gone so wrong for him, he doesn’t care about living.

Somehow he found the idea loathsome—especially in connection with Gideon. It insulted him, turned him into a coward. Yet the thought persisted. Matt was scowling as Hughes said, “I think you should stay and supervise the running of—”

“No.
Frank can do it. I’m going to wash my face, put on my shirt and boots, and go get drunk—in that order. When I see you again, I expect you to hand me a finished portfolio—as well as a finished copy of that book to which we now owe our souls. Good evening, Mr. Hughes.”

I
N NEW YORK CITY
, Eleanor Kent began that same Wednesday evening in a mood of great excitement. An unidentified guest was to visit the Booth Association. The weekly meeting had been changed from Tuesday to accommodate the visitor’s schedule.

Charlie Whittaker was in charge of the affair. The preceding week he’d announced in his usual portentous way that the visitor was someone important in the theater, and was coming to Hutter Hall specifically to look over the troupe. Though all the members including Leo Goldman pestered Charlie ferociously, and even subjected him to a few mild threats, he had refused to say anything else. Consequently Eleanor’s anticipation had mounted steadily over the past few days. It was a joy to have something about which she could be genuinely excited for a change.

Who could the mysterious guest be? Some well-known actor? A producing manager? Why would either sort of person bother with an amateur club?

Well, she’d know soon enough.

She hurried with her preparations for the evening. The sweetly scented powder she dusted on her cheeks and the backs of her hands helped offset the dank smell the mansion acquired in the summer. She’d picked out her lightest frock, but she still felt uncomfortably warm as she started down the second-floor corridor. The house seemed to have that effect lately. It produced a sense of confinement, of stale air imprisoned in lightless rooms, and of unhappy people imprisoned by their circumstances or, in her case, by the lack of courage it took to escape.

She knocked softly at her brother’s door, then went in. “Will? I’m leaving.”

He looked up from his reading, his eyes lackluster. “Do you have to go again tonight?”

“Yes!” She felt guilty about her sharpness, then resentful of his dependence on her.
If only I could make myself stop caring about him
—
and about Mama
—
I could leave this wretched place.

But that was impossible. She tried to go on more calmly. “Don’t you remember? Tonight we’re having our surprise visitor.”

Will gave a small shrug, as if he couldn’t comprehend the importance she placed on such things. He should be able to understand, she thought. Her refuge once a week was the Association, but he had his own, available every day. His room overflowed with stacks of books of all kinds and sizes. He read those books at the expense of everything else. Over the past year his marks had gone down at the private day school he attended. He’d lost twenty pounds, and was becoming more and more passive and withdrawn. Eleanor felt incompetent to take him in hand. She’d tried playing ball with him in Central Park, but it wasn’t the same as the camaraderie two brothers would have enjoyed. She’d encouraged him to walk over to the Park when boys from downtown gathered to organize ball games. The noisy, working-class youngsters intimidated him. He wouldn’t set foot across Fifth Avenue by himself even though his eyes said he’d clearly like to go.

How wretched and forlorn he looked as he laid his book aside and stood.
Papa caused this when he walked out,
she thought. No matter who had started all the arguments between her mother and father, she held Gideon responsible for the misery in the household ever since her birthday a year ago. He was the one who had chosen to desert his home and leave her trapped here by her conscience and her responsibilities.

“Eleanor?”

“What is it?”

Will’s eyes darted past her, as if to make sure the door was shut. “What if—what if she starts seeing those people again? It’s happened twice already this week.”

Those people.
The formless, faceless men who came stealing to surround the mansion when darkness fell. Only Margaret saw and heard them.

This evening Eleanor had tried to avoid thinking about her mother’s condition. It was impossible. Resentment of her father burst forth again, almost as fierce as her resentment of the duties thrust on her by his departure.

Still, there was concern mingled with her anger. The concern won out. She drew Will’s skinny body against her side and held him a moment, even as the resentment slewed in a new direction.

I can’t stand the misery of this place. Dear God, I must get out or I’ll die.

But of course she couldn’t leave. Someone had to keep things running. Her mother was incapable. Margaret consumed tonics and spiritous liquors from the moment she rose in the morning until she retreated to her room at dusk to hide from the imaginary watchers. Fortunately she had hired an excellent staff in her more lucid days, and that staff required only minimum supervision from Eleanor.

Will, however, was another matter. He was a responsibility she was failing to handle adequately—though could anyone do it, given the atmosphere in which they lived? It was an atmosphere of fear, and now it turned his voice shrill and made him clutch her forearm.

“Tell me what to do if she says they’re outside again. What if she screams, Eleanor? Tell me what to do then.”

“Send Mills for Dr. Melton.”

“But Mills will be driving you to the meeting.”

“It doesn’t take long to reach Irving Place”—early in the year the subterfuge of the Latin lessons at the Whittakers’ had been abandoned with everyone but her mother—“and he’ll be right back. I’ll come home as early as I can, I promise.”

Disconsolate, the boy retreated to the chair. She left him with the book in his lap, his hands on the chair arms, and his eyes fixed on some point in space. As she went out the door, a puff of wind flared the curtains, and he started violently.

Poor Will—jumping at gusts of air. Cowering from the sight—the very thought of his own mother.

The blame all belonged to Gideon.

Eleanor had been hurt that he’d walked out. Hurt, but she’d understood after she calmed down. She could well believe that her mother might have lied about certain things. Margaret was unwell.

Her father, on the other hand, was fully in control of his faculties. He had no excuses. And so Eleanor’s pain had slowly changed to outright animosity when Gideon didn’t bother to communicate with her, or with his son.

His failure to send his children so much as a note of remembrance on their birthdays, or at Christmas, confirmed her fear that he no longer cared about either of them. Several times she’d asked Samuel whether the day’s mail contained anything from her father, and he always said no in a strange, tense way that told her he, too, thought it was shameful that Gideon didn’t write.

An occasional visit by a representative of the Rothman Bank served to remind everyone that Gideon had provided Margaret with a more than generous bank account. The last two times the banker had called, Eleanor had received him; her mother was in a stupor. Eleanor didn’t understand much of what the man said, but evidently that didn’t matter; on the essential point he was quite clear—there was money enough to meet expenses and always would be.

Money couldn’t buy forgiveness for her father, though. If he thought it could, he was damnably mistaken.

Sometimes she did wish Margaret and Gideon would reconcile. For one thing, she would then have been able to meet Uncle Matthew, who’d been back in the United States for nearly a year.

Of course he’d been traveling a lot during that time, doing illustrations for some book Kent and Son was to publish. But his name had popped up in newspaper gossip columns, and she’d heard the servants clucking about his escapades. Diving into an ornamental fish pond filled with white Bordeaux wine during a weekend party thrown by one of the rich, fast crowd up at Newport. Romancing some blond beauty at the Saratoga Springs racetrack. Visiting Cooper Union to speak with the evening art classes about trends in Britain and in France. He’d quoted the war cry of the painters called the French realists—
“Le soleil est dieu”
—and endorsed it, thereby touching off a small riot between sympathetic listeners and the more traditional students. Uncle Matt was Bohemian, highly advanced in his thinking, and famous in a disreputable sort of way. Of those few people she could count as family, he would have understood best her growing certainty that she would be an actress one day. Because her father was gone, she had no opportunity to tell Uncle Matt how she felt—and that was one more thing for which she blamed Gideon.

Still, some of her feelings about him conflicted with her anger. From time to time she wondered what he did with his free time after he left Printing House Square in the evening. Where did he live? With whom did he take his meals? Other newspapermen? Uncle Matt? That mistress whose existence she believed in, even though she had absolutely no evidence the woman existed?

Gideon’s absence left an aching void in her life. It was more than just a sense of something being gone. Deep down, she cared about him, and worried about him. The servants still sneaked the family paper into the house, so she knew there was some sort of labor trouble on one of the railroads in West Virginia. And she’d heard cook say her father had gone to report on it firsthand, as he sometimes did with important stories.

Eleanor’s instantaneous reaction had been a hope that he wouldn’t be hurt. A few minutes later that reaction brought surprise, then disgust. How was it possible for her to love and hate a parent at the same time? Her inability to answer the question, or explain away her behavior, only deepened her confusion.

Going down the staircase, she saw her mother wandering aimlessly across the foyer. When Eleanor reached the bottom of the stairs, some three yards separated her from her mother. But she could smell the tonic. The odor of its alcohol base grew steadily stronger as she approached.

Margaret was slow to note that her daughter was dressed for the street. When she did, she asked, “Where are you going?”

“To the Whittakers’, Mama. The tutor could only come on Wednesday this week.”

Her cheeks were pink as she said it. She disliked having to lie to her mother when everyone else in the house knew she attended Association meetings. She lied because references to the theater still agitated Margaret—although not as much as something else she now touched on indirectly.

“That’s all right”—Margaret’s hand brushed at a loose strand of hair but somehow failed to touch it—“so long as you’re not going to see your father.”

“Never,” Eleanor declared. It had become a ritual, that question and her answer. So long as she promised not to see Gideon—as if she would—Margaret was relatively lax in keeping track of her whereabouts. It was about the only real benefit she’d derived from her father’s departure.

With careful contrivance, she could even arrange for Mills to drive her to an occasional matinee, and pick her up afterward. Inevitably, she drew stares and comments when she entered a playhouse without an escort. And she needn’t have done it. There was a young man who would gladly have accompanied her. But his constant attention had created a whole new set of potential problems, and she had enough already.