False Gods (3 page)

Roger decided to accept this. He would not have done so in Richmond, but then Richmond was reality, a quality he was not willing to accord New York.

The president of the club, Charles Van Rensselaer Pratt, turned out to be just the man he had been looking for. He was every inch a gentleman—at least, as Northerners defined that term—tall and grave and dignified, with a short, well-cut beard and dull blue gazing eyes under bushy eyebrows which seemed to be wondering whether you were as much a gentleman as he. His Knickerbocker background would have qualified him more for the presidency of the Union than the City Club, but Roger had heard that his intense patriotism during the war, throughout the whole of which, like Roger, he had fought, had prompted him to resign from an institution some of whose most distinguished members had favored a compromise peace. Pratt at forty looked ten years older, as fitted the senior partner of the Wall Street firm that his late father had founded, and his reputation for honor and high-mindedness was unchallenged. The same, however, could not be said of some of his partners. There were even those who dared to suggest that he was a figurehead of respectability to be displayed in nobly speechifying meetings of bar associations and behind whose broad and stylishly tailored back a good deal of less edifying but profitable business was transacted.

Pratt was intrigued by what he called Roger's decision to "move his career north." He visited the club regularly on Monday nights, when his wife dined with her invalid mother, and made his two whiskies last for two hours. He soon made it a habit to invite Roger to join him at his reserved table in a corner of the barroom. They would talk of problems facing the South and what Pratt called its "future redemption and regeneration." Roger, for whom whiskey had become a controlled solace, found that it increased his tact by temporarily softening his bitterness. He was not even tempted to call the club president an ass.

"Oh, I suppose the South will come back in a way," he conceded as he puffed his pipe, for he smoked now too. "But it will not be in any way that will interest me. I have seen the old days, and there can be no possible revival of
them.
"

"But surely in time the great plantations will revive. Will it make such a difference to you that the hands will be paid instead of owned? Mightn't they even be more efficient?"

Roger smiled inwardly at this hint from the counsel to capitalists. "It's not that, sir. I belonged to the civilization that died at Appomattox. I do not care for reconstructions."

"So you will stay here?"

"If I can survive here."

"And bring your family north?"

"In time."

"How do you think they will like it here?"

Roger smiled again, this time outwardly with a touch of grimness. "Kitty will like it, if I can buy the things she wants. The boy, I suppose, will grow up a brave little Yankee."

"And what about your place? It's called Castledale?"

But Roger was not ready to discuss Castledale with even a well-meaning Yankee.

"My brother will take care of it."

"Well, I'm sure that our divisions will heal sooner with men like you in our midst. Men who have fought with courage and conviction for a cause in which they seriously believed."

Roger treated himself to a long sip of whiskey in answer to this. Nothing could be allowed to impede him from finding an opening in Pratt's firm. When he spoke, it was to give the topic a new twist. "Does it ever occur to you that the real winners of the conflict in which you and I battled so long and hard were not the soldiers at all, but the ones who had the wit to stay home?"

Pratt's blue eyes took on something like a spark. "You mean the dastardly profiteers?"

"I mean all those who put business ahead of war. How many of your veterans do you see in the entourage of the new president?"

Pratt's sigh was windy. "Very few indeed, I fear. General Grant seems to have forgotten his old comrades. I cannot see what
he
sees in market speculators of that type."

"If we fighting men would stick together, we might have a chance to run the show."

"Do you know, sir, I
like
that idea! And do you know that of the ten partners in my firm I am the
only
one to have worn the blue uniform?"

Roger raised his glass. "To the blue and the grey!" He just managed to suppress a laugh as Pratt smote the table with his fist in his enthusiasm.

Roger had a project for Pratt on their next meeting. He had been reading in the newspapers about the struggle of the New York and Albany Railway Company to corner the stock of the Ontario line, a client of Pratt's firm. He had obtained copies of all the briefs in the various lawsuits involved and studied them carefully. On a Monday night at the City Club he expounded a plan of defense to Pratt that was so simple as to have escaped the attention of the lawyers on both sides.

"I note that the Albany line has succeeded in obtaining an injunction from Judge Barnard of the Supreme Court of New York County prohibiting Ontario from issuing more stock for any reason. I fail to see the basis for so sweeping an order."

"The basis, I fear, may lie in the venality of His Honor. The Albany line is stronger with the city's judiciary than we seem to be."

"The
city's
judiciary. What about trying a judge farther north? In Sullivan County, say, or Columbia?"

"But what have they to do with us?"

"As much as any of the supreme courts in Manhattan. Doesn't each supreme court have plenary jurisdiction throughout the state?"

"Hmm. That is so, isn't it? But why should upstate judges interfere in matters that don't concern them?"

"You could make it their concern."

"How?"

"How did your opponents do it?"

"You don't mean we should bribe them?"

Roger laughed so that he could retreat into a joke if needed. "Think how much cheaper an upstate country judge would be than one of the gorged jurists of our opulent town!"

"Carstairs, what are you saying?"

"How many of these black gowns were fighting men, Pratt?"

Pratt looked at him gravely and then chuckled. He too would treat it in jest. "Still, the idea of petitioning an upstate judge is interesting. I'll discuss it with my partners. After all, we might find one who would be glad to correct an injustice. Yes, why not? It is certainly a novel idea."

Pratt took the matter up with his firm, and the very next day Roger was summoned to the office of the partner in charge of litigation, Carl Gleason, a ferret-faced little man whose nervous fingers roamed like spiders over the silver objects on his desk while his cold eyes remained fixed on his visitor. Having heard Roger's exposition, he wasted no time in offering him a job as a clerk in Pratt & Stirling. But he was clearly a bit taken aback by how hard Roger bargained over salary; obviously he was dealing more with a fighting colonel than a starving ex-rebel attorney. When they came at last to terms, he issued this parting warning: "I trust it is quite understood that you are working for me and no other partner. And no other partner includes even Mr. Pratt. I am always very particular with that in litigations."

Roger nodded. He quite understood. There were things he might have to do that the senior partner was not to know about. That the senior partner might very well not
want
to know about. And indeed his very first job was to journey north to the township of Ayer in the county of Clinton to consult one Supreme Court Justice Owen, whose initial reluctance to exercise his injunctive powers in favor of Mr. Gleason's client was overcome by an envelope passed silently across his desk.

Thereafter it was always Roger who took care of what Gleason called the "delicate side" of litigation. His salary was increased twice so that after only two years he was able to bring Kitty and young Osgood north and lodge them in a brownstone on Brooklyn Heights. And only two years after that he presented himself one morning before Gleason's desk and coolly demanded to know whether the time had not come for him to be made a junior partner in the firm.

"But you're paid as much as a junior partner now!" Gleason protested. "I thought you were too great a Virginia gentleman to care about our Yankee partnerships."

"Why I care should be obvious to a lawyer as smart as yourself, Mr. Gleason. An associate can always be dumped. I do not wish to be dumpable."

"And if I refuse?"

"And if I go to the Commodore?"

Commodore Vanderbilt was then busily engaged in trying to corner Ontario stock. A former clerk of Ontario's counsel, particularly one who had handled "delicate matters," would find rapid employment with the old pirate.

"Are you trying to blackmail me, Carstairs?"

"The definition is yours. All I ask is fair treatment. We sink or swim together."

"Jeff Davis shouldn't have wasted you in the cavalry. If he'd had you in his cabinet, treason might have prospered."

Roger stiffened. "In the old days I'd have called you out for that. But now may I simply remind you that secession was not treason until established by
force majeure.
And that President Davis, as we referred to our chief executive, would never have stooped to your ways of doing business."

"
My
ways!" Even the hardened Gleason gaped at this. "Well, of all the nerve!" But he was not a man to make an issue out of inevitable things; he even managed a grin. "You'll never believe it, Carstairs, but I was planning all along to make you a partner."

"Of course I don't believe it. But shall we agree that I'm to be a member of the firm as of the first of the month? We can discuss my percentage later."

Gleason threw up his hands. "I agree."

Roger not only became a partner. Ten years later, when Gleason died of a stroke, he succeeded to his position as chief of the department with a higher percentage of the firm's profits than the nominal senior partner, Charles Pratt. The older and more distinguished members of the bar may have been disturbed by rumors of his methods of convincing the judiciary, but the tolerant and cynical laymen of the day took for granted that he was probably little worse than his fellow attorneys.

Roger neither made nor sought to make friends in New York. His manners were polite but formal; he asked nothing of his partners or clients beyond completion of the particular business at hand. Kitty, on the other hand, was strikingly successful. She bloomed in Manhattan society and charmed everybody with her revived Southern belle manners. She was as open and witty as he was silent and grave; she dressed and talked well and entertained delightfully in the brownstone mansion of her dreams that Roger had built for her on Murray Hill on condition that he would not have to preside at her parties. For that he summoned north her bachelor brother Lemuel, even more of a dilettante than in his Paris days, and bought a literary gazette for him to edit when he was not escorting Kitty about the town. Society much preferred the genial Lemuel to the austere Roger, and the brother and sister were soon among the most popular couples in Gotham. Much as Roger scorned Kitty's social success, he was too just not to recognize that it ill became a husband who had brought his wife to a strange city to begrudge her her adaptability to its ways.

He gave Kitty what she wanted, but he gave even more to the re-embellishment of Castledale. His brother Ned, too self-effacing to occupy the main house and contenting himself with the old overseer's lodge, lovingly supervised the restorations ordered by his senior: the cleaning and stretching of family portraits, the affixing of new panels to interior walls and new bricks to the outer ones, the installation of plumbing and central heating, the replanting of the gardens and box, and, most important of all, the arrangement, against appropriate settings of new curtains and carpets, of the beautiful Colonial and early Federal furniture and porcelains purchased by Roger at auction sales of the grand old mansions of the South. For if he thus seemed to join the plunderers of the Confederacy, it was only to bring together the finest of its treasures in a museum to be devoted to its memory and to be paid for with Yankee dollars.

This, of course, had to be the justification of everything he had done since Appomattox. His only happy times were the occasional weekends he spent at Castledale, roaming the rooms and corridors and riding over the grounds. Kitty never accompanied him, claiming with undeniable truth that he would rather be alone with his "true love," but in the first years of the restoration he had sometimes taken Osgood. The poor boy, however, was not only plain and stout; he was hopelessly dull. He had at an early age given up trying to curry favor with the stern father of whom he stood in helpless awe; he seemed to divine that it was not within his limited range to gain paternal affection or even approval. Yet Roger sometimes reluctantly suspected that his son would have given anything to be loved a little. Kitty was a demonstrative but easily distracted mother, and the smallest amount of warmth from a taciturn and preoccupied male parent might have made all the difference to the lad. But every time Roger resolved to pay him a little more attention, the boy would irritate him with some odious Yankee expression or demonstration of his ignorance of Southern history and tradition, and at last he resolved to take him south no longer, justifying the decision with the reminder that, after all, he intended to convert Castledale to a museum and sanctuary where Osgood would never have to live.

Ned Carstairs did not approve at all of what he dared to call his brother's demeaning of his nephew, and he stepped out of his usually subservient role to argue roundly that Osgood was the rightful heir to Castledale and should be trained to be a good proprietor. But Roger was not accustomed to taking advice, and least of all from Ned, and he simply shrugged in answer. And so it was that Osgood played little part in his father's life until the night when, aged twenty-four, a bank clerk still living at home, he penetrated the usually forbidden-to-all area of the paternal study to announce that he was engaged to be married. Roger, surprised for once, looked up at the round serious eyes in the round pale face of his only child and felt a pang of remorse that he should not have the least idea of who the young lady might be. In his confusion he took refuge in sarcasm.