Skinny Island (2 page)

I eyed him in disbelief. "You grossly exaggerate the precarious condition of my bank. My only concern is why you are doing so."

Philip looked up at the ceiling as if in appeal to whatever deity might exist among the chandeliers of a Moorish house. "Father, you're living in a fool's paradise. Listen to the prayer of your son. Don't let Jacob Smull turn it into a fool's hell!"

I glared at my unhappy heir. "I can only presume, sir, that you have had a glass too much of your father-in-law's excellent punch. Let me wish you a happy new year!"

Turning to the hall I should have left the party then and there but for the fact that Mary, my lovely daughter-in-law, hurried after me and caught me by the arm.

"Mr. Peltz! You can't go without drinking to the new year with me."

I turned at once back to the punch bowl with dearest Mary, and we each took up a glass.

"I saw you talking to Philip, and you both looked so glum! I'm afraid Philip has been worried about business matters. I'm so relieved you're here. You always put things in their right proportion. You make sense out of the most chaotic messes. When I am with you I believe that the world has a beginning, a middle and an ending. I like that. Oh, dear Mr. Peltz, I like it very much!"

I looked devotedly into those dark, dark eyes and at that concerned, heart-shaped face. "I hope you don't like it too much, my dear. We live in a strange new world."

"Oh, don't say that! Don't
you
say that. That's the way Daddy and Philip talk."

I took her hand to pat it. "Then I shan't, my dear. You and I will show them the way. We'll show them there's not only a future, but a great and noble past. And that it's always with us!"

My daughter, Agatha, was my last visit that day, all the way north on Fifty-seventh Street in the row of French houses that Mary Mason Jones had erected for herself and her lessees. I have never seen the sense in trying to turn our chocolate city into a feeble copy of Paris. It simply emphasizes all the things we haven't got. Agatha went to France in the winter after the terrible
commune
and was able to bring back all sorts of Second Empire furniture, some from Fontainebleau itself. Now her house is full of gilded bees and eagles and odd curlicued chairs whose seats turn on wheels and long narrow divans you can't really sit on. I wonder she doesn't sometimes reflect on the fate of the empire that produced these things.

Agatha has gushing good manners that seem to go with her buxom blondness and the frou-frou of her heavy taffeta dresses, and she always treats me with elaborate respect and affection. But I well know that beneath her demonstrativeness there beats a heart that is the willing slave of her handsome, philandering husband, whose total lack of imagination, sometimes erroneously identified with sound business acumen, has led him into some very bad deals indeed. I feared that the new year was going to bring further troubles when she led me aside from her guests for a private conference.

"Father, I know you'll forgive me for intermeddling in a matter that is, properly speaking, only your affair. But sometimes things come up where I just have to."

"What sort of things, my dear?"

"Well, now, don't get all mad when I tell you it involves your sacred Irving Club."

"I can't ever get all mad at you, silly girl. But I fail to see how you could be very much involved with a gentlemen's small dinner club."

"It's just that I gave a great friend of Charles's the least little reason to believe you might not oppose his membership."

"In other words," I said, smiling, "you promised him my vote. Which in the Irving is still tantamount to his admission. Well, I don't know that's such a terrible crime. Charles knows we need younger members, and I can't imagine where we would rather look for recruits than among the young bloods who make up his circle."

"Except this wouldn't exactly be a young blood."

"Oh? Well, age need not be a total disqualification.
I
am hardly the one to raise it as a bar. Who is this gentleman, pray?"

Agatha paused. "You may be surprised."

"Surprise me then."

"Conroy Morrissey."

I stared and then blinked. "You mean a relative of the judge?"

"I mean the judge himself."

"Agatha, is this a joke? The taste is questionable."

"It's not a joke!" she cried in instant indignation. "Judge Morrissey is putting together a real estate deal that could make our fortune if he'd only include Charles. Oh, Father, you can't spoil it!"

"I know all about Morrissey's real estate deals," I said dryly. "I also know about his congressional record during the war. The man is not only dishonest; he was a Copperhead. He backed McClellan in sixty-four. I could almost prove he was a traitor. And you told him that
I
would favor his admission to the Irving? I wonder he didn't laugh in your face."

"On the contrary, he said he had always been one of your greatest admirers."

"Well, he can continue to admire me from afar. A member of the Irving! Why, even if I could face the scandalized faces of my fellow members, how could I bear the reproachful eyes of your brother Archie's spirit? Or of the three hundred thousand other boys who perished to preserve our union."

"Oh, Father, you and your war. It's always hopeless when you start waving the bloody shirt."

My
war! The bloody shirt! In one small decade had all memory of valor departed from the land? I had to be quiet for a moment to keep myself from some unseemly explosion. It was true that my enthusiasm for the Union cause had amounted to a religion—almost, in the eyes of some, to fanaticism. I had perhaps thought too much in terms of the glorious phrases of Mrs. Howe's battle hymn accompanying General Sherman's thrilling march to the sea and too little in terms of the corpses and maimed bodies of our boys in blue. And on occasion I force myself to recall—oh, the bitter memory!—the mild reproach of my darling Archie the first time he was wounded and I rushed to his side in Virginia with a pass from Secretary of War Stanton himself. "Father," he murmured from his bed of pain, "did you stop to think that the men who escorted you to the front may have had to risk their lives?" Which is why I did not go to him after his fatal wounding at Gettysburg and was not there to hold his hand when he died. But whatever my exaggerations, whatever my sentimentalities even, as some might call them, are they not preferable to Agatha's cold indifference to the generation of dead boys that made her ease and opulence possible?

"Some memories will always be sacred to me," I at last limited myself to stating.

"But don't you see, you can't just live in memories?" Agatha demanded. "The world moves on. Archie himself would have seen that. He was always a practical fellow. He and I used to conspire together on how to dress things up when we had something to ask of you that we were afraid you'd refuse."

"Are you implying, Agatha, that Archie, if alive today, would approve of my taking into a club a man who wanted to sell out to secession?"

"All I'm saying is that Archie would have let bygones be bygones. He did enough fighting in the war. He wouldn't have kept it up all his life."

I am afraid that I almost disliked my daughter at that particular moment. Certainly I did not wish to stay another minute under her roof.

That unhappy night we sat down twelve at my board for a dinner meeting of the Irving Club. The dozen men present included two judges, a former governor, a former mayor, the president of Columbia University, Jacob Smull and my son Philip. I thought the dining room with its Duncan Phyfe chairs, its splendid dark mahogany sideboard with the golden eagle claw feet and my great Sully of President Washington had never looked finer. I hoped that it would make a suitable impression on Smull for his first appearance in our midst. It did not.

But nothing would have, as I now sadly see, other than the promise of a profitable investment. Smull appeared to me that night in the full glare of his singleness of mind and purpose. Perhaps it was the contrast that he afforded to my more richly variegated guests. Small, dry, bald, tight-lipped, he seemed to have shriveled to a mere husk of acquisitiveness. He did not even bother to pretend that it was a gratifying experience to make his maiden appearance in our midst. He spoke in a mild, rather quavering tone that nonetheless had the persistence of a bubbling stream. If it was occasionally lost to louder tones; as soon as the latter subsided, it was heard again.

"If you don't mind my saying so, Governor, you're going to see some rather cloudy skies in this Huntington Beach project. It's all very well for the developers to assume that the potato farmer will welcome the intrusion of additional summer residents, but have they taken into consideration...?"

As the evening wore on my dismay began to identify itself more with my other guests than with Smull. For when other topics were introduced, a novel of Mark Twain's, plans for the new art museum, the plight of the Western bison, an exhibition of Kensett's landscapes, Smull treated them as if they had been so many coughs or sneezes, either keeping a brief silence or else countering with another business question, only perfunctorily related to the subject. And the table went along with him! My distinguished fellow members were like so many choir boys swapping stories, who came to respectful attention when the priest came in to direct their attention to the service. Had I discovered the essence of our civilization? Men will defer to the first in any group who introduces a topic that is recognized as sacred. On an English weekend, over the port, I have seen how quickly the subject is changed, even from politics, to hunting; in France, even from money, to women. With us it seems to be money. Spending it, hoarding it, marrying it, killing for it—all of which strike me as at least human or dramatic subjects—are not in question. Only the making or the increasing of money seems to matter to the true Yankee.

As the evening wore on and I became more and more silent, the small white face of Jacob Smull with its ever-moving pale lips began to seem to me less dull than sinister. He even achieved a kind of dignity, for there were unquestionably aspects of leadership in this sere wisp of a man. He was not, after all, just a grubber for coins; he was in fact a kind of priest, the prelate of an established order, an Inquisitor, a Torquemada, who knew that he did not have to raise his voice or wave his arms to command attention and profound respect.

After dinner he came to sit beside me in the library for a word apart from the others.

"It has been a pleasant evening, Peltz," his flat tone reported. I have never heard him use a Christian name. "It occurred to me that you might like to hear of a gentleman who might appreciate these gatherings. I need not tell you of his distinguished public career. I refer to Judge Morrissey."

I felt a tickling through my veins. I actually smiled at my interlocutor! And then I recognized what was going on in my mind and through my limbs. It was the arrival of an irreversible decision. It was actually a pleasant sensation!

"No, you need not tell me, Smull. I know all about Judge Morrissey's treasonable career. Had he had his way we should now be two nations. And one of them would be a slave state."

My tone was so matter-of-fact that Smull needed a minute to take in my meaning.

"Was it treason to be opposed to Abe Lincoln?"

"I believe so."

"Then you wouldn't consider his candidacy?"

"Never. But you're free, of course, to ask others. I shall simply resign if he's elected."

Smull pursed his lips into a tiny arc. "Well, I guess if it's no club for you with him, it's none for me without him. Good night, Mr. Peltz. Do you need my written resignation?"

"It won't be necessary, Mr. Smull. I'm sorry you feel as you do. We shall continue to meet at board meetings of the bank, I trust."

"For a time, Mr. Peltz."

He did not even have to put a threat in his tone. The words did everything.

There was an atmosphere of relief when Smull had left, and the group now talked about everything under the sun, from the new territory of Alaska to the merit of Walt Whitman's poetry. We were very hearty and drank several bottles of champagne. When all but Philip departed at midnight, I told him of Smull's resignation. He was grim but not surprised.

"He never forgives, you know. He seems impersonal, but he's not. He's vindictive."

"What can he do to me?"

"Kick you out of Standard Trust."

"Haven't I reached an age to retire?"

"Father, what are you going to live on?" There was an agony of concern in Philip's tone, and I recognized with a start that my son still loved me. "You know how much your principal has eroded."

"I do know. I shall sell this house and take a single room in one of the new hotels."

"You! Adrian Peltz!"

"I shall be a free man, Philip."

"I suppose you could always live with me or Agatha."

"I couldn't live with Agatha. You know that. And I'd never impose myself on your darling Mary."

"Father. Dad. Listen to me. That all sounds very brave, but you won't like it when it comes. I had an idea that something like this was going to happen tonight, and I brought a manuscript I want you to read. You know that Mother kept a diary in her last two years, don't you?"

"And that she gave it to you before she died." I nodded gravely. I had been bitterly hurt that she had not entrusted it to me. "To do with as you saw fit. In your absolute discretion. I have honored her wish. I have never even mentioned it to you."

"I know. You have been, as always, the perfect gentleman. But now I am exercising that discretion. I am giving it to you."

I stared. "You think there is something in the diary that will alter my decision about Smull?"

"I hope there may be."

"I shall read it this very night."

"It won't take you very long."

It didn't. The journal covered only two years of Cecilia's life, and each entry was brief; I was able to read it in a couple of hours. I had expected to be emotionally unsettled, and I was, but differently than I had anticipated. I found myself perusing the spidery handwriting with the admiration, at times even the jealousy, of a fellow journalist. For what was truly astonishing was the way in which our town, our whole life, was filtered through the curtains of the writer's sickroom windows. Cecilia had seen more from her chaise longue than I in all my perambulations of Manhattan.