Back Bay (22 page)

“I’m… I’m sorry.” The boy sounded sincere, or at least sincerely frightened.

“Sir.”

“Sir,” the boy grunted, and Wilson let him go.

Now, an uneasy truce prevailed. The family servant was giving orders to the grandson of the patriarch, who resented orders from anyone.

Wilson gazed over the side. The boy’s white body seemed to glow through the murk, and the strands of rope swirled around him like a tangle of roots beneath a water lily. Gracefully, he collected two strands and fitted them to a corner of the strong box. He put the ropes in his mouth and sprang to the surface.

He caught his breath and handed the ropes to Wilson. “Lash them to the oarlock.” Before Wilson could speak, Horace filled his lungs with air and dove again.

For the next ten minutes, Horace struggled with the harness, but he could not secure it. As he broke the surface a fifth time for air, Wilson caught him by the hair.

“Into the boat,” commanded Wilson. “We’ll have no more games.”

The boy tried to pull his head out of Wilson’s grasp, but Wilson held tight.

“Let go of my hair,” demanded the boy.

“Into the boat.”

Horace grabbed Wilson’s arm with one hand and tried to tread water with the other. “Let me go!”

“Time for a little rest, sonny.” Wilson started to pull him out of the water.

Horace grabbed Wilson’s arm with both hands and struggled free. For a moment, his head slipped below the surface. He swallowed several great gulps of salt water and began to choke.

Through his telescope, Pratt was watching the scene, but he couldn’t tell what was happening. He squinted hard and cursed his old man’s eyes. Then he saw the boy’s body emerge from the water and, with Wilson’s help, climb into the boat.

Young Horace collapsed in the stern. He was coughing up water like the town pump.

“Spit it all up, Horry, my boy,” said Wilson. “There’s better things in the is world to be drinkin’ than muddy water from the Back Bay.” He took his flask from his pocket and offered it to the boy.

Horace stopped gasping long enough to refuse.

“Suit yourself.” Wilson tilted his head back and emptied half the flask.

Wilson pulled on the set of ropes wrapped around the oarlock. The harness, which had not been secured, slipped off the strongbox and floated to the surface. He held it up for Pratt’s telescope. Pratt understood the meaning when Wilson made a gesture of disgust and flung the harness into the bow of the boat. Pratt removed his hat to wave them in but changed his mind. If the boy was too weak, Wilson would know enough to bring him ashore.

Young Horace had finished coughing and sat shivering beneath a blanket in the stern. Wilson was pulling up the anchor rope in the bow.

“I told you, I’ll be all right, Wilson,” said the boy. “Drop the anchor, and I’ll try again.”

“I’m just checkin’ the depth.” He let the rope slide through his fingers and watched the bag of bricks hit bottom. “Still a bit over six feet. About as deep as it ever gets. What’s your height?”

“Five foot three.”

“Tall for your age. Kids is growin’ bigger all the time. Too bad you ain’t about a foot taller.” Wilson took a fresh coil of rope from under the bow seat and flipped it into the boy’s stomach. “First, get your breath, then go down there and tie it to the handles on that strongbox.”

The boy threw the rope back at Wilson and reached for the harness. “I’ll do it my way. The harness was working perfectly.”

A slap cracked across his face and knocked him into his seat. “I’ll teach you to respect your elders, whether your granddad’s
watchin’ or not. Now we don’t have no time to waste with foolish contraptions like that harness.”

“It’s not a foolish contraption,” said Horace, stroking his cheek.

“And we don’t have no time to waste arguin’. Because if you take a look over toward the bridge, you’ll see a rowboat headin’ up the Charles. Prob’ly fishermen. And upstream, there’s two sailboats skippin’ down from Cambridge. Harvard boys out for a nice Sunday on the river. And here we sit, in full view of all of them, tryin’ to raise the strongbox your granddad lately stole from President Jemmy Madison himself. Now in you go.”

Horace didn’t budge. The excitement of diving for treasure was gone. He was cold, frightened—although he wouldn’t admit it—and angry. He had never been struck by an adult before, and his pride was stinging more than his cheek. He glared at Wilson. “I intend to tell my grandfather that you raised your hand against me.”

“You tell him anything you want, but he made me captain of this here rowboat, and I’ll take no more of your backtalk.”

“You’ll get no more talk of any kind.” Horace pulled the blanket tightly around himself and stared out at the sailboats. He wasn’t moving.

Wilson leaned close to him. “It’s all right, Horace.” he said softly. “Most boys tryin’ to be men acts more like boys than men. A few years from now, you’ll be a man with a little bit of boy left in you. Then I’ll rightfully expect you to act like a man.” He fitted the oars and prepared to leave.

Horace threw off his blanket, stood angrily, and snatched the rope from Wilson’s seat. “I promise you two things, sir—the tea set within ten minutes, and your job by this afternoon.” He dove, purposely rocking the boat and splashing water all over Wilson.

This time, the chill of the water aggravated his anger. Adolescent fury, aimed at Wilson and anything else that irritated him, rolled off Horace in waves. The cold was one more persecution. His dive brought him straight to the bottom. He grabbed one of the handles on the strongbox. He passed the rope through it twice, snapped the rope across the top of the strongbox, and pulled it through the other handle.

Wilson watched from above. He saw the boy’s anger reflected
in his uncontrolled, jerking movements. Horace’s whole body was pouting. He was a child forced to perform an unpleasant task. The footman tugged on the rope, signaling for the boy to surface.

Horace paid no attention. The air in his lungs was getting thin, but his anger was unabated. Wilson was stupid and primitive. Horace would follow his orders to the letter but take no blame if they failed to raise the tea set before low tide.

The boy needed slack to make a knot in the second handle. He pulled gently. Nothing played out from the rowboat. He focused all his anger in the rope. He pulled at it violently and two feet uncoiled into the water. He jammed the rope through the handle, then jammed it again. The second time, his hand slipped completely through the handle, and he tore the skin off his knuckles. He pulled up. The hand didn’t move. With his left hand, he grabbed his right wrist and tried to pull free, but his right hand was wedged tight. Two twists of thick rope lashed him to the strongbox.

He felt a stream of bubbles escape from his nostrils and roll across his cheek. He had been holding his breath for nearly two minutes. He could not hold it much longer.

Seen from the surface, his movements did not seem unusual. Wilson thought the boy was still angry at the rope. Then Horace turned over and looked up. The terror in his eyes would cut through Samuel Wilson every night to the end of his life. The old servant froze. He could do nothing.

The black bulk of the rowboat almost on top of him. The horrified face peering down from behind the mirror. A hand breaking through the mirror and reaching for him. These were the last things that Horace Taylor Pratt III remembered. He reached for the hand. He called aloud for help. Three obese bubbles carried his cry wobbling to the surface. Salt water rushed in to fill his lungs, and his body rolled back toward the bottom.

Wilson saw the bubbles break on top of the water. He knew he was too late, but he had to do something. He thought the body was tangled. He cut the ropes leading to the strongbox, but the body didn’t swim free. For ten minutes he struggled. Finally, he was able to grab the boy by the leg and pull. The body was limp,
the muscles relaxed; the hand slipped loose from the grip of the strongbox. Wilson hauled the body to the surface and laid the heir to the Pratt empire in the bow of the rowboat.

The panic had drained out of him. He felt numb, mechanical. His mind disconnected from his body. Shock was already protecting him. Samuel Wilson left the tea set in the mud and made for Gravelly Point.

Three quarters of a mile away, a figure draped in black stood on the shore. Across the waters of the Back Bay rolled a long, loud, wordless cry of pain.

The clouds burned off by noon, and the warm sun of late summer washed down on the garden behind Horace Taylor Pratt’s home. As Pratt grew older, he enjoyed the garden more and more. It was one of the few areas of his city that hadn’t changed. He could sit in his room, look out across the flowers and trees and vines, and see the world as it looked forty years before, when his son Horace was a boy and their lives were before them.

He sat there now in the deepest despair of his life. He had no thoughts of a golden past, no hopes for the future. All hope for Horace Taylor Pratt lay in the cool, damp basement of Wilbur Hennison’s mortuary, and the facts of the boy’s death, altered to disguise the purpose of his plunge into the Back Bay, had been duly recorded in the constable’s office on Summer Street.

The soft sound of a woman’s singing drifted into Pratt’s room. Franconia sat beneath the grape arbor at the top of the hill, her voice entwined in “A Summer’s Day.”

“Who will tell her that her Horace is dead?” Abigail stood behind her father. She held her hand gently on his shoulder, but her voice was soaked in recrimination.

“I have endured more pain in a single day than most men know in a lifetime. I cannot sustain more.”

Abigail nervously ran her hands down the sides of her dress, smoothing wrinkles that weren’t there. She left her father and appeared a moment later in the garden below. Slowly, reluctantly, she climbed the hill, past the petunias and salvia which had bloomed all summer, past the chrysan-themums which would soon burst forth, past the blackberry bushes, to the arbor.

“ ‘It fell on a summer’s day,/While sweet Bessie sleeping lay/In her bower, on her bed,/Light with curtain shadowed…’ ”

Pratt could see splashes of pastel pink and yellow through the coat of leaves around the arbor. When Franconia stopped singing, he leaned forward to listen. Except for the screeching of two blue jays, the hillside was silent. A minute, then two, then five. He wondered if Abigail had not been able to tell Franconia. He worried that he would have to tell her himself.

Franconia began to sing once more. “ ‘Jamie came. She him spies,/Op’ning half her heavy eyes.’ ” Her voice quivered. “First a soft kiss he doth take./She lay still and would not wake./Then his hands learned to wood./She dream’t not what…’ ” Another voice rose out of Franconia, at first blending with her song, then choking it in a mother’s primeval wail for her dead child.

Pratt couldn’t listen. He closed the window and locked the bedroom door, sealing himself from the world. He studied the face reflected in the mirror above the dresser. The brow still arched proudly. The mouth was still firm and unyielding. The jaw jutted forward like the prow of the
Gay Head
. But nothing else remained of his youth.

“I keep no glass in my room, Horace, because it encourages pride, a wanton love of one’s own mortal image. Pride is a sin, my boy, and all good men must avoid anything that will bring a stain upon their soul.” Pratt’s father spoke to him again across sixty years. “Go forth into the world. Conduct business, make goods, teach, or minister, but always remember that what you do is for God, not yourself. When you do only for yourself, you cannot call yourself a Christian.” The voice was gone.

Pratt did not take his eyes from the image before him. It spoke to him, or he to it. “Horace Taylor Pratt, you are an evil man. You have spent your life in the prideful pursuit of earthly things. Now you have nothing. Your world is crumbling around you, and your greed has killed what you most loved. You are an evil man.”

He was still staring at the mirror half an hour later.

Abigail pounded on the door. “Father, are you all right?”

“I breathe.”

“Please open the door, Father. Gardiner Greene is here to see you.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

“He is here as a friend. He’s here to comfort you.”

“Let him comfort my daughter-in-law. No man can bring me relief.”

“He has given a potion to Franconia. She is asleep. Please let us in.”

Pratt opened the door and placed his cane across the space. Despair was no longer etched in his face. He seemed intense, determined. “Good afternoon, Gardiner.”

Gardiner Greene was a neighbor and an old family friend. His garden on Pemberton Hill was one of the most beautiful spots in Boston. He had the kind face of a man who enjoyed working with the soil, and Pratt couldn’t stand him. “Hello, Horace.”

“Can we come in, Father?” asked Abigail.

“I’m going to be busy for quite a while, my dear. Send Wilson to me right away.”

“Wilson is…”

“Drunk?”

“No, Father. He put the carriage away, unhitched the team and fed the horses, and sat down in the carriage. He has not moved or spoken since.”

Pratt did not react. “When he is free, send him to my room.”

“Is there anything we can do for you, Father?”

Pratt opened the door wide enough to allow Abigail inside, then slammed it on Greene. “The funeral service is to be held at Park Street Church tomorrow. I want the Reverend Mr. Whitehead to preside.”

“Yes, Father.”

“The boy is to be buried in the family plot, next to his father’s monument.”

“Yes.”

“Now, take down my Bible for me and leave me in peace.”

The Pratt family Bible was an enormous leatherbound King James edition published in 1700. It contained the names and birth dates of every Pratt from Richard, born in London in 1626, to Elihu, Jason Pratt’s three-year-old son. Pratt asked for quill and ink. He clumsily wrote “September 9, 1814” next to the name
and birth date of Horace Taylor Pratt III. He studied the line for a moment, as though trying to comprehend its finality.

Abigail placed her hand on his brow. She stroked his hair gently. She could not remember the last time she had seen him reading the Bible. “The Good Book will help you, Father. It will give you strength.”