The First of July (3 page)

Harry Sydenham, New York, July 1913

T
HE FIRST TIME HARRY SYDENHAM
had Marina all to himself was at the Aquarium in Battery Park. Long afterward, he thought it had probably been a bad choice; but he had wanted to go somewhere that was outside the usual New York social round. Somewhere any ordinary New Yorker might go, and yet where they would never run into anyone she knew. Even then, he thought it might not have impressed her well-connected family to know that he was escorting their only daughter down to Lower Manhattan.

Once outside, he and Marina leaned over a wall, with the breeze in their faces, looking across to Ellis Island and watching the ferries on the choppy water. The Indians had called the Hudson Mahicantuck—“river that flows both ways,” she told him, surprising him with her knowledge. The wind and the screaming gulls were enough to make conversation hard. Eventually they’d found the sort of restaurant she had clearly never entered and which might have been in a back street of Naples. She had been as excited by this as he was every day by aspects of the city she took quite for granted, and her appetite for unfamiliar dishes—oils, rich tomato sauce, rough bread—had delighted him.

Even after he had married her, he never told her of the two places he liked best in New York, fearing that she would think them too ordinary, too vague; not places so much as worrying states of mind. On the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge, he would stand by the waterfront and gaze across the East River, the water obsidian black and glittering with the lights of Manhattan’s sleepless nights, or he would walk through Central Park on a misty, frozen winter day, past the menagerie and under a sky of soft pink-blue and a vaulted tracery of bare branches. It was the other-worldliness that drew him back to the far side of the river: observing the electric dazzle from a distance, he was hidden in darkness like an assassin. In the muffled distortion of the icy park, hearing tropical noises from the zoo and footsteps passing on parallel paths, he became, again, invisible.

For him, beauty in New York was a matter of achievement and ambition. The great red stone blocks, the sheer confidence of those buildings and the carved family names of so many from the Old World who must have arrived in a state of poverty and could now proclaim success: Mannheim, Carlotti, Trüdl, Steinbacker.

Marina was herself a Steinbacker on her mother’s side and a Van Guyen on her father’s. Her blue eyes and silver-gilt hair would have looked at home in Delft or Bavaria, he thought. In England, much that was thought beautiful was simply a matter of its having endured through time. A building that had survived since the Wars of the Roses, a parkland full of medieval oaks, thatched manor houses whose beds had supposedly been slept in by the great Elizabeth. The older and more fragile the substance, the more the English admired it. The more ancient the family, the more profound the inertia that kept it fixed in the very spot it had occupied for five hundred years, the more that family was revered. He liked the whole, unfinished rawness of the New World. He would go out early to draw sketches of the city growing: the girders and electric lighting and the cranes dipping to welcome ships arriving from the Atlantic. The garment factories and the soapy vapor from basement laundries, the motorbuses and the subway from City Hall to Broadway, the trains setting out to cross a continent, and the steam and sparks at Grand Central Station.

If he were honest, he liked noise. Even in the rooms of his apartment, four floors up, looking out over the treetops, with echoes muffled by wooden paneling and Turkish carpets, he reveled in the hum of this city, which had taken him to its heart. On hot nights, with the sashes open, when it was too hot to sleep, he would lie and listen to distant sounds and rejoice at his own anonymity in the great grinding machine. Yet there had been much that had shocked him when he had first arrived: squalor, violence, destitution, things he might never have seen if it hadn’t been for his nocturnal walks, or which he might indeed
have
seen if he had ever bothered to explore the industrial cities of his mother country. He even allowed himself to think back to the woman many thousands of miles away, whom he had once thought he loved, and to feel ashamed that his view of her, so romanticized and physically charged, had completely ignored the fact that she was driven by a need to escape the poverty he now saw around him every day.

He had initially bought into a textile factory. It should have been folly—he knew next to nothing about industry, although his late mother’s family had made a fortune in brewery; but he wanted to invest in a business he could work in himself, not just profit from. He was fortunate that although his business partner had had little capital, he was honest, knowledgeable, and experienced. What they shared was a wish to use modern methods, to expand but also to provide the usual hostel for the workers, mostly women, mostly immigrants—not so they could live in a virtual prison but so their conditions could be improved. Behind their backs and, indeed, to their faces, heads were shaken. A penniless idealist and a rich and ignorant Englishman, each exploiting the other. The machines would fail, the business would fold, the workers would take advantage: they would, indeed, steal; their competitors would flourish. But instead it was the workers who flourished with basic medical care, adequate food. Some stole, undoubtedly, some may have taken advantage. Some substituted less healthy sisters or friends when it came to medical care. Some smoked cigarettes or got pregnant by strangers. But many thrived. Classes were introduced to teach English to women who spoke only Italian or Yiddish. In time, the best employees became overseers, less brutal than their predecessors. The workers stayed and gained new skills as more sophisticated machinery was introduced. Harry bought better-quality cotton, sent out work to skilled finishers. A few, a very few, other businessmen came to look at their methods.

Then, in early 1911, his partner, who was only in his thirties and had no family, had drowned while ice-skating, and to Harry’s astonishment had left him his half of the now-successful business.

A month or so later, in March, came the calamity that had been waiting to happen, falling on one of his competitors whose factory was an old-fashioned sweatshop. One hundred and forty-six women and children, locked into their workplace at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, had burned to death or jumped to meet it on the pavements of Manhattan. The papers were full of pictures of charred and broken bodies: small bundles of rags on the hard New York sidewalk. Suddenly philanthropists and politicians found a useful model of enlightened industrialism in Harry Sydenham. It was a pity that he was British, but at least he had declared no intention of returning to his native land. In spirit, the papers reported, he was an American: a man of innovation and energy, a man of ideals.

One newspaper proprietor had taken a liking to the young entrepreneur with the pleasing energy of youth and the equally pleasing acquisition of wealth. Harry was also a gentleman and so, in due course, the proprietor, William Van Guyen III, had introduced Harry to his daughter, Marina.

To Marina, born in America and shuttling between Fifth Avenue and Long Island, the juddering cogs of the city were invisible. She gravitated toward the parks, the squares, the flower stalls, anything that to her represented the place it had once been, before the coming of its European settlers: the sea, the river, the banks, the marsh and its islands. She believed she liked nature unspoiled, whereas, Harry thought, what she liked best was nature controlled, with all risk and ugliness removed. He, whose roots were so deep in the Old World, roots that still tried to draw him home even now, found passionate joy in industry and commerce and novelty, whereas she, the great-grandchild of immigrants who had mined the New World for all its treasures so that she might now enjoy them, was nostalgic for the pastoral and the unchanging.

She was a competent water-colorist—indeed,
more
than competent—and she painted wilderness, but on a small scale: domesticated, reduced, made manageable. Sometimes he accompanied her to the small galleries that showed her work. They were mostly patronized by her own circle, but that didn’t diminish the pride he felt in her careful draftsmanship and technical skill. Her pictures were popular, and those who bought them had mostly made fortunes in commodities or industry: steel, or rolling stock, hotels, brewing, in land development, shipping, or factories. It seemed ironic that her large family, whose origins lay in the flatlands of Europe, its infinite horizons vast above networks of polders and canals, went into raptures over her careful depiction of the towering Rockies.

He rarely thought of his own home. He almost smiled at the notion: he tried so hard not to call it that in conversation, but in his head it was always that. Abbotsgate. There he had been born, there he had grown up, there he was determined not to die. Letters from his stepmother, Isabelle, almost convinced him that not to return would be churlish and unnecessarily unkind, coming close to pulling him back, but it had now been far too long. Her very warmth made the distance between the two continents seem not only greater but even more desirable.

He had never seen his half-brother, Edward, although Isabelle had sent him a studio portrait. A solemn and sturdy little boy stood by a draped table, wearing a sailor suit and holding a small riding crop. He had a similarity to Harry in the way that all little boys in society photographs resembled each other.

Marina, who was very much attached to her remaining family, found his attitude curious when she had first asked him about his home.

“So your mother died when you were young, and you have a stepmother, Isabel?”

“Isa
belle.
She’s French.”

“Isabelle. And a brother, Teddy?”

He had nodded. “Half-brother. And he’s only ten or so.”

She made a face, which he read as sympathy for the little boy. “But you seldom go home?”

“
This
is my home.”

She had nodded solemnly as if she understood a terrible sorrow. Looking at her, he feared she was constructing some Gothic drama based on the novels she devoured.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“My stepmother is a kind and good woman. My stepbrother is a healthy and happy child. They live in a lovely part of England. I am very fond of them,” he’d added as an afterthought.

“I love your Englishness,” she’d said. “You could be very
fond
of a gin and vermouth. Or a day out sailing.”

He smiled.

“What business was your family in? I’m not annoying you, am I?”

“Not at all. On my mother’s side, brewing. On my father’s side, they have always farmed. A small agricultural and sporting estate.” This was a partial truth; the land his father owned, though large in England, would not be especially impressive in the American Midwest. “They were all very, very interested in horses.”

“Horses,” she said, her face contorting in mock despair. She had admitted to him weeks ago that horses were something she couldn’t paint. He had then admitted that he drew only as a hobby—a dilettante, he’d said—and when she insisted on seeing his drawing pad, she was silent and solemn as she went through charcoal sketches of men working, of machinery, of untidy areas of the city and gulls over a rubbish dump, then pronounced that he was better than she’d ever be and that, despite this, she loved him.

But he always thought he had begun to love Marina, and be freed of the past, on that late July day by the Aquarium.

Jean-Baptiste, France,
April 1914

I
T HAD ALL GONE WRONG
because Godet the blacksmith’s reactions were too slow. The old man had no right to still be working; he was getting on and had a limp from an injury back in his youth. Jean-Baptiste’s role in the forge was to provide the strength that Bernard Godet, although remarkable for a man in his sixties, now lacked.

Godet had a flesh-and-blood nephew, but the man had married a mill-owner’s daughter from Amiens and thought himself above the life of a village blacksmith. The mill-owner had built the couple a good-sized farmhouse on rich land near the river on the far bank from Corbie, to make the point that young Monsieur Armand Godet had moved onward and upward. The nephew showed no great skill at farming, Godet had added, and had even been attacked by his own pigs, but no doubt it passed the day.

Godet dealt with the customers, kept the books, chose the metal, kept the fire heated to exactly the right temperature. Jean-Baptiste started by fetching and carrying and holding the horses’ heads, then progressed to operating the bellows. What he’d thought would be easy work, just a matter of pumping, turned out to be a matter of skill: a judgment that had taken Godet half a century of gauging the relationship between fire and iron to perfect. It seemed as if Godet could smell temperature. When they visited farms, Godet drove the cart but Jean-Baptiste did the loading and unloading. They went to the nephew’s once. Over the front door was set a carved stone, with the couple’s initials entwined and the date of their marriage. Bright windowboxes of red flowers made the whole building look like a child’s picture. As soon as the cart stopped, Jean-Baptiste thought it looked all wrong. It was the tidiest farm he’d ever known.

Godet was watching him. “You’re wondering: where’s the shit,” he said. And shook his head as if in the presence of a great folly.

Madame Godet waved at them from the front step, her dark hem bouncing on cream buttoned boots. Her hair was a pile of yellow curls and her blouse a froth of white that was tight to the wrist and rose to her chin, but was somehow still insubstantial. She was unlike any farmer’s wife Jean-Baptiste had ever seen.

“Uncle,” she said, and looked surprised. “Armand’s in Amiens with Papa. He never said that you were coming. I thought you were Doctor Vignon. My chest is not good. Not good at all.” She massaged the relevant area, gave a musical cough. Looked beyond them, back up the lane.

They left two heavy blades for the plow. “Good as new,” Godet said, but she was scarcely listening and didn’t invite them in.

Godet was not above grabbing the bigger hammer when a lady came by, although this was uncommon enough not to threaten his health, but mostly it was Jean-Baptiste who battered the glowing pig iron into submission. Godet told him the best metal came from the east. “Lorraine,” he said, and spat on the floor. “Don’t know what they are: French or Germans, nor which side they’re on from one day to the next, but their iron is rightly French iron, dug from French soil.”

Despite the talk of newly mined iron, most of the metal Jean-Baptiste used was simply melted-down worn horseshoes, broken farm implements, hoops from rotten barrels. Some odd bits and pieces arrived by night, were exchanged for a few francs and then stored in the lean-to shed at the back. When he asked Godet where they came from, Godet just winked. He had never been much of a talker, Godet, not with human beings, anyway, though he muttered gently at the horses. Occasionally he would embark on a single story and then, as if he’d used up some ration of words, not speak for two weeks.

The one time Jean-Baptiste peered into the lean-to while Godet was relieving himself, it seemed to be mostly railings and some pipes. There was a cross like on a wayside shrine and a small iron gate which, if he hadn’t heard Godet returning from the privy, he would have looked at more closely to confirm that it was the de Potiers coat of arms. Doctor Vignon had once explained the crest, which was engraved on the gates to the chateau, the church, the school, and even, strangely, the abattoir. It was a creature with two faces looking in opposite directions and was called a sphinx; this denoted the fact that Monsieur de Potiers’s great-grandfather had gained his rank and estate by serving Napoleon Bonaparte in the Armée d’Orient in Egypt and, it was generally believed, saving his life.

“Why does it face both ways?” Jean-Baptiste had asked.

He was rowing at the time, and it was only when he glanced up that he saw Vignon looked amused as he answered. “Perhaps Colonel Clovis de Potiers needed eyes in the back of his head? The sphinx was said to be exceedingly clever but treacherous. Perhaps, even in his moment of triumph, the colonel needed to be alert to betrayal?”

“Who was going to betray him? General Bonaparte?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think it was Bonaparte, would you? Bonaparte could just have had him locked up if he wanted rid of him, or sent him off to Russia. The real betrayals are usually much closer to home.”

Since he had started work at the blacksmith’s, Jean-Baptiste saw less of the doctor. Sometimes he spotted him at a distance, hurrying down the street with his black bag or drinking a pastis outside the Café Desmoulins on a fine day, but he missed rowing him around and he missed the stories. At first, he checked Vignon’s boat from time to time to make sure it was still sound. No one else owned a small boat that was in such good condition. What if Vignon sold it? Monsieur de Potiers was home from Paris now, so Jean-Baptiste doubted his wife was free to float about as she wished. Jean-Baptiste tried to fight his growing loyalty to the blacksmith and his pleasure in his work. He tried to hold on to the certainty of the journey he would make, but weeks passed when he didn’t get around to walking along the riverbank to check that the boat was still tucked under its overhanging willow.

So when, after a few months, he turned around to find Dr. Vignon just inside the archway to the forge, he had been surprised and relieved. Vignon held out a rowlock, the pin sheared off from the arms. It was a Thursday. Vignon’s immaculate appearance was at odds with the heat and fiery grime of the forge, and Jean-Baptiste, his trousers belted tightly, the hems tucked into his father’s boots, his chest bare and glistening, felt suddenly naked. He stopped, put his arm up to mop his brow, and smelled his damp armpit as he did so.

Vignon looked awkward. “Was just off fishing when I snapped this off,” he said, adding “I’ve missed your company. But you’re a grown lad now; other duties, other sirens call, no doubt?
Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe, Ergreift es mit wildem Weh
?”

There was an awkward pause. “Is that English?” Jean-Baptiste asked. He had written down the few English words Vignon had told him early on, but they seemed inadequate for a possible new life in a new country.

“No.”

“It’s German,” said Godet, appearing from behind Jean-Baptiste, with an expression that Jean-Baptiste thought of as his spitting face. But he did not spit this time.

“Heinrich Heine,” Vignon said. “A great Romantic poet. A great lover of France.”

“German,” said Godet.

“Art transcends borders,” said Vignon, and Jean-Baptiste thought he had never seen a man so close to spitting, yet not letting fly, as Godet at this second. He didn’t know what “transcends” meant, and he was pretty sure Godet didn’t either. Godet stretched out his hand and took the rowlock from Jean-Baptiste, running a finger over the broken end.

Vignon nodded to Jean-Baptiste. “Good to see you looking so well. Perhaps … the boat, some time … ? Fishing?”

When the doctor had gone, Godet finally let fly. The globule landed in the embers with a brief and angry hiss.

“Fishing,” he said. “Fishing. Of course he is. With a long line. But not in M’sieur de P’s waters, now.” It was said with a passion of loathing that the blacksmith normally reserved for the Church.

A few minutes later, Godet went on, “I don’t trust the man. Who knows who he is, where he comes from with his pernickety accent? What’s a man like him doing here—apart from fishing? Or poaching, I should say?” He grunted three times and turned to his workbench, putting down the rowlock and picking up a scythe with a bite out of the blade. Felt it with his hand. Grunted again.

Jean-Baptiste jiggled the coins in his pocket. He was paid every week for the journey upriver. He didn’t know what to say.

A rather dirty boy was hovering in the yard, holding a piece of paper. The child had a pale, narrow face and hair cropped so closely that his white scalp showed through.

Godet walked over to him, took the note, nodded. “Tell Sister Marie-Joseph that we’ll be up in the morning,” he said. The boy, with his large, startled eyes and big feet, looked like nothing so much as a young hare, Jean-Baptiste thought. He was already turning away when Godet said, “Do you like pears, boy?”

The child looked wary, as if this might be a test.

“Come on,” Godet said. “Let’s get you some pears. Jean-Baptiste here can look after the business.”

Godet was gone only ten minutes, and when he returned the child was nowhere to be seen.

“Starving hungry and fearing for his life in case he was late back,” Godet said, with real anger in his voice. “And they call them holy sisters. More like a coven of witches.”

The nuns kept themselves more or less to themselves behind their high wall. The orphans were quiet boys and girls whose eyes slid away from strangers’ smiles or the offer of a cake from a shopkeeper. When they grew up, those who weren’t funny in the head went to be soldiers or laborers if they were boys, and the girls became servants or did sewing. Death was quite a frequent visitor at the convent.

“They think they’re some kind of saints because they tidy things up,” said Godet. “And because we don’t want children who remind us of our indiscretions and sorrows, nobody asks any questions.” He lit his pipe, sucked hard two or three times, his eyes half shut. “Me, I’d rather give a child to a tribe of savages with bones in their noses than the holy sisters.”

Jean-Baptiste was used to Godet’s ways, but this time he was shocked. Even his mother said her prayers every night, slowly in summer, very quickly in winter.

An hour later, one of de Potiers’s men brought in a bay gelding, leading it with a halter.

“It’s got the jiggers,” the man said, twitching the rein, stepping back a pace. “It’s a holy horror her ladyship calls Prince of Araby, but I call it a little bugger that needs the sting of a stick to show it who’s master, and now it’s gone and shed a shoe.”

Godet moved forward to take the rein, but the groom held tight. “It’s best I hang on,” he said. “You never know what he’s got in mind.” The horse was rolling its eyes and pawing the ground. Jean-Baptiste took the long way around its rear end to take the money.

Godet was stroking the horse’s flank now, murmuring to it, and the beast stopped fidgeting and trying to walk sideways. It exhaled noisily and stood still.

“Well, you’ve got a way with them, for sure,” the groom said and, at the sound of his voice, the horse started up again.

Godet and the horse stood and looked at each other.

“Well, are you going to fix it?”

Godet grunted. He stood in silence, stroking the animal for a minute or so, then ran his hand slowly down the horse’s leg and lifted its hoof. He looked down, smoothed it with his hand, feeling for roughness as Jean-Baptiste had seen him do so many times before.

“Well, will you look at that,” the groom said. “I’ve never ever seen him so easy.” He stepped closer and the horse shuffled away from him, but Godet held him firm.

Jean-Baptiste handed him a file and he began to smooth the hoof, making no quick movements that might startle the bay, though it occasionally tossed its head to rid itself of flies. The forge always had this problem on warm days. When all was done to his satisfaction, Godet set the foot down.

“They say that there’s trouble brewing… .” said the groom. “Of course we hear these things up at the chateau, seeing as Monsieur is an intimate of the president. What he says is Europe is a tinderbox. If there’s a war, France will be right in the middle of it, he says. They’ll need soldiers. Revenge for the last time.” He pulled irritably at the halter and the horse did a little sideways step. “But Monsieur de Potiers wouldn’t let me go because he likes things just so. He’s a stickler. So that’s all right then.” He shot a glance at Jean-Baptiste.

Godet had turned away and was choosing metal for the shoe. He took a piece down, placed it in pincers, and set it into the fire. As he moved back toward them, the horse shook its head and flies lifted off. The groom’s response was to tug hard on the rein.

“Hold still, you bugger,” he shouted.

As the horse sheered away backward, the groom caught his foot in the trailing end of the halter rope and fell. The horse reared up. De Potiers’s man rolled fast to avoid the animal’s hooves, but Godet was slower and perhaps more trusting. The horse kicked out and caught him a mighty clout on the leg. As the leg collapsed under him, Godet grabbed instinctively at the first thing to hand, grasping wildly at the handle of the pincers, which tipped off the forge, and he fell to the floor with a groan. The metal spun in an arc, Jean-Baptiste ducked, and the hot iron hit the horse, which no one had tried yet to recapture. The animal went mad. It whinnied and rose up, its hooves like weapons. Jean-Baptiste jumped back. The groom was already cowering on the other side of the anvil, but Godet was just lying there, stunned, and as the horse’s front hooves came down, they landed on the old man’s head and chest. Jean-Baptiste moved as quickly as he could, but the horse was crashing into everything now and the noise seemed to enrage it further. By the time he grabbed the rope, it was almost impossible to hold.

He shouted at the groom: “For God’s sake, help me. Get it out of here.”

Godet seemed unconscious and there was a terrible wound to his head; his temple looked misshapen. Blood trickled out of his nose; the palm of an upturned hand was burned. Jean-Baptiste thought that this injury was going to be a problem for the old man with his work, even as he realized how irrelevant a burned hand was now.