Barkskins (68 page)

•  •  •

She knew something now; the only true safety was money. Very well, Lavinia Duke, a wealthy and able businesswoman, would build a protective wall of money. And within ten years Duke Logging and Lumber had a general manager and assistants, a sales manager, dozens of landlookers, thirty logging camps, a few miles of forest rail and a steam locomotive named James; it had barges and ships and their crews, sawmills and finishing mills, two furniture mills that used hardwoods, as well as blocks and lots of choice downtown Chicago land; it had Flense's roster of lawyers, who played legislatures, senators and congressmen like they were banjos. Chicago's ten railroads covered the city like the spread-out fingers of two hands. Two lots Lavinia had bought in the summer for twelve thousand dollars each were valued at more than twenty thousand six months later. She bought as much land as she could. She knew Lawyer Flense was buying whatever he could for himself. The Chicago population exploded from twenty thousand to almost one hundred thousand in those few years.

She often watched the ship traffic on Lake Michigan, noticed fewer sails each month and more steamboats. She cultivated newspapermen who praised Duke Logging and Lumber as a philanthropic, job-giving business of impeccable moral distinction and Lavinia as a rare and progressive businesswoman. An occasional small municipal gift such as a bandstand or a contribution to Fourth of July fireworks set off yards of enthusiastic prose. She urged editors to praise the manliness and toughness of shanty men, inculcating axmen with the belief that they could take extreme risks and withstand the most desperate conditions because they were heroic rugged fellows; the same sauce served settlers unto the third generation, who believed they were “pioneers” and could outlast perils and adversities. Loggers and frontier settlers, she thought, would live on pride and belief in their own invulnerability instead of money. She learned that small gestures secured tremendous goodwill. When she heard that the shanty boys at one camp had played three old cat on a Sunday she decreed that work should stop at Saturday noon in Duke camps and the afternoon be given over to pastimes such as baseball, but that no amusements would occur on Sunday, the holy day of rest. For this she was held up as a devout but modern sportswoman and invited to Hoboken to attend a Knickerbockers' game.

After these dinners she often sat at her rosewood desk and, in a habit she had taken from Posey, wrote down as much of the conversation as she could remember in a book bound in green leather. She outlined her plan to cheaply buy up schooners, strip them of masts and rigging and make them into lumber barges.

But dinners with political men and lawyers were even more interesting and the hot questions of the day—slavery, “free soil” and territorial expansion—never burned more fiercely. A well-known senator, a champion of democracy much inclined to oratory, used her table as a platform. “The people who live in whatever states or territories they live in have the right to make their own decisions. It is none of the government's business to decide if a territory may permit slavery inside its borders or no.” He did not mention that his wife owned a cotton plantation with a hundred slaves and he himself received income as its manager. The phrase “will of the people” was always in his mouth; he meant the will of white people, for another of his banners was that “the Constitution was made by whites
for
whites.” After all, who else was there?

“Hear, hear,” echoed down the table.

•  •  •

People streamed into the country—almost a million Irish in twenty years, half a million Germans. They came from all over the world, Germans, Canadians, English, Irish, French, Norwegians, Swedes. The world had heard of the rich continent with its inexhaustible coverlet of forests, its earth streaked as a moldy cheese with veins of valuable metals, fish and game in numbers too great to be compassed, hundreds of millions of acres of empty land waiting to be taken and a beckoning, generous government too enchanted with its own democratic image to deal with shrewd men whose people had lived by their wits for centuries. Everything was there for the taking—it was the chance of a lifetime and it would never come again.

For some it did not come at all: a logger whose cheap boots fell apart during the spring drive, another who did not regard a slice of raw pork dipped in molasses as the acme of dining, the man laid up for six months by a woods accident immobile in bed while his wife took in “boarders” who stayed in the house less than twenty minutes, a drought-ruined Kansas family eating coyotes to stay alive. And in Chicago fast-growing slums, hovels built from scrap wood and rotted leather clustered around the stockyards, lumber mills and tanneries encircled by poisonous water.

L
avinia was corseted and dressed for the day in green silk, an elaborately draped skirt over a bustle. There was a lace frill at her throat. Out on the open deck of the cupola the wind was like a clawing, rolling wildcat trapped between lake and sky. She saw two distant ships on the trembling horizon, but looking south over the city with her opera glasses, she saw no slums. She turned again to the north and squinted at the ships. The wind pulled at her black hair piled on top of her head. There would always be the poor, hordes who had no ambition to better themselves. The world swarmed with terrible problems but they were not her affair. She strained to make out details of the faraway steamers. A telescope was needed. Despite her superior position she had her own difficulties: the gnawing aloneness (for Goosey Breeley was more like a chest of drawers than a companion), tiresome business negotiations, spiteful rivals—and succession. It was legal now for women to own property and she had to decide who would inherit Duke Logging and Lumber, the great timberland holdings, the mills and railroad stocks. The wind pulled at her hair. Smoothing the loose strands she went inside and laid the opera glasses on the marble-topped table just inside the door. The thought would not leave her. An heir had to be someone of the Duke bloodline. It would
not
be Goosey. She had a swiftly dissolving thought of the human flotsam that came to cut trees, their lives nothing beyond a few sweaty years with an ax. Despite their winters in the forests they all seemed to produce large families. They had no worries about succession, nor about credit or character.

“My God,” she said to her silver-framed dressing room mirror, “how do they stand it?” Her hair was a fright wig. But who they were and what it was they had to stand was unclear. People spoke of happiness, but what was that? What was anything? Posey had had no such doubts, nor James, who fretted over nothing except the most banal irritants. But she was different. She had terrible wrathy feelings directed everywhere. She was short-tempered with people who did not respond to her requests speedily. If they could not keep up with the pace of development, let them stand aside! James had taught her that getting ahead was the important thing. Of course the problems and impediments were endless, the brain-wracking decisions of which men she could extend credit to, and she almost envied women like Clara, who simply let a husband guide them. Honor and promise had ruled in James's day, but now there were so many rogues about that money and contracts were the only safe way to proceed. Thank God for Tappan's Mercantile Agency, with its reports on the worth of individual businessmen. She relied on their astute judgments. Bad creditors could bring the largest businesses down. And children: was not that the root of her discontent? Perhaps not, for she disliked the sight of pregnant women, who seemed everywhere, especially along the rural roads. Farm women were like sawmills. She shuddered and went downstairs for tea with Goosey.

“Your hair!” cried Goosey, clasping her large pale hands. “Shall I get a little lavender oil to smooth the flyaways in place?”

“Thank you, Goosey, that is what I need, but I would prefer the damask oil. Lavender is too reminiscent of bedsheets.”

Goosey was back in a minute with a vial of scented oil and a feather. “You should always wear a head scarf when you go to the cupola,” she said in a flat voice, knowing Lavinia would not bother.

•  •  •

The question of heirs began to disturb Lavinia's sleep when Cyrus and his family, as well as many Chicago people high and low, fell ill with typhoid. Cyrus perished in great pain with intestinal perforations. The children went one by one and finally Clara, demented with grief and helplessness, fashioned a knotted loop in a heavy shell-pink silk scarf, stepped off a chair set on the dining room table and hanged herself from the chandelier.

That winter Lavinia herself had many illnesses, intestinal gripes and skin eruptions. She had not liked Clara but missed her, missed poor old Cyrus. Under the pressure of these afflictions she began to examine the Duke family papers for possible heirs and consult with foreign-born genealogists; she found few Americans interested in ancestral searches, as they took pride in being unshackled by the past—unless they had a distinguished early family member and then they waved him like a flag. She reviewed her relatives. Sedley Duke's children by his second marriage had all died without issue. Lennart Vogel had never married. Edward and Freegrace had no known children.

“You know,” she said to Mr. Flense, “it is unpleasantly clear that I am the last surviving Duke.”

“Nonsense, Lavinia. There must be heirs out there. You must employ someone to search for them.” His tone was impatient as if there were undiscovered cousins stacked like cordwood in some nearby cave. But she had doubts; could genealogists discover any heirs, whether in the still-United States or in the Netherlands? The two savants she discovered—Sextus Bollard of Boston and R. R. Tetrazinni in Philadelphia—both presided over bookshops where tracing family lines eased long hours between customers.

Lavinia invited each to Chicago for an interview. The first to arrive at the house for dinner and the interview was Sextus Bollard. He was at least sixty, Lavinia thought, looking at his old-fashioned checked trousers. But he did carry a fine stick with a gold knob in the likeness of a gorgon's head.

Goosey and Mr. Flense dined with them and they made small talk about Mr. Bollard's journey (difficult) and the tale the conductor told him of the horrors of crossing the plains to the west. He said sparks from the engines often ignited the dry grass, and that passengers cowered in their seats as the train made its way through a sea of flame. He said that during one unfortunate traverse flames had seized the train and roasted the passengers like pigeons. “Indians came and ate them as we would a turnspit ox. I counted myself fortunate to have had no worse adventure than encounters with the uncouth inhabitants of Ohio and Indiana Territory.”

“A very disturbing tale if true,” said Mr. Flense, “but I fear the conductor was pulling your leg, Mr. Bollocks.”

“Bollard, sir, is the name,” snapped the guest. “And I believe he told the truth as he showed me the clipped illustration and account from
Harper's,
which he kept in his breast pocket to entertain travelers.” He narrowed his eyes at Flense, to whom he had taken a dislike.

After dinner Goosey went upstairs and Lavinia, Lawyer Flense and Mr. Bollard went into the library to give him copies of the Duke family papers and discuss the terms of the genealogist's employment.

“Of course Holland, but not France?” Bollard asked. “My cursory examination of your papers indicates your ancestor Charles Duquet came from France. Indeed, from Paris. Is that not correct?”

Lavinia felt a burning itch on her neck, one of the unpleasant blotches that came so often. “Yes, of course, France. It slipped my mind. Though we always have thought of Holland as our point of origin—Uncle Lennart Vogel fostered that idea. Our ancestor Charles Duquet has always been something of a mystery. It has been my understanding that he vanished in the wilderness. But do search in Paris. Who knows what you may find? I am thinking you might begin with a six-month search. Of course we will pay your travel expenses, and provide a purse. And if necessary to make more trips we can discuss it when the time arrives.”

“And do keep receipts for even the smallest purchases,” said Lawyer Flense. “That is the correct way.” And so Bollard, who considered Lavinia a paler, older, homelier and more modern imitation of the learned female characters in Thomas Amory's
The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq.,
closed his bookshop and sailed for France on the trail of Duquet relatives, his valises packed with scratch paper, grammars and dictionaries; he read French but did not speak it and planned to write out his questions.

Tetrazinni, younger and with a wild red beard and spectacles in pot-metal frames, came a week later. He was more modishly attired than old Bollard—a pleated shirtfront with a turndown collar and a wide silk tie drawn through a heavy signet ring, velvet waistcoat and—were they?—yes, they were, black velvet trousers. The dinner was mutton and boiled potatoes. Tetrazinni stared musingly at his plate and looked several times toward the kitchen door, but no larded capons nor Pacific oysters came. Goosey was ill with a catarrh and sipped a little veal broth in her room. Lawyer Flense sawed at his mutton, listened to Tetrazinni's verbose and excited account of his journey—by some stroke of coincidence he had been regaled by the same tale of the burning prairie as Bollard. Over the dried peach pie Lawyer Flense caught Lavinia's eye, nodded and made his excuses.

“I fear I must run. I have a court appearance tomorrow and wish to be fresh for argument. Delighted to meet you, Mr. Tetrazinni, and wish you good fortune in your search,” he said, bowing and backing.

Lavinia and Tetrazinni went to the library for port and she gave him the bulky packet of family papers, most copied out by Annag Duncan and Miss Heinrich. Tetrazinni's fingers flew through the pages for a few minutes but he did not stop talking. He had too many questions to suit Lavinia. They had hired him, why could he not do his job without harassing her for names? Surely the old family records and letters were enough—if he would shut up and read them instead of gabbling on.