The Banished Children of Eve (25 page)

“Look!”
Brace said.
“Look around thee!”

Charles couldn't take his eyes off Sarah, the profile of her face. He stirred in his seat, unable to get comfortable.

“Is something wrong?” Stark asked in a low voice.

“No, I'm warm, that's all.”

Stark
covered his hand with his hat so that only Charles could see the finger he pointed toward Sarah. “A suitable cause for heat.” He winked.

From the pulpit, Brace warmed to his subject. “In the space of a single decade, a generation of darkness has been raised up in this city. The specter of Sansculottism! Ten thousand children a year born to superstition and poverty, their destiny to become prostitutes, burglars, shoulder-hitters, pickpockets, purse-croppers, garroters, short-boys, murderers!”

Sarah turned her head slightly, as though she had become aware of Charles's staring. He looked down at his shoes and tried to concentrate on Brace's words.

“The intervention represented by the Newsboys'-Lodging-House, which your generosity made possible, cannot suffice to meet this threat. Yea, if we recognize the thing for what it is, we shall see that there is only one influence capable of exorcising forever the rise of Sansculottism. I speak not of a man nor a party but of a place. The land. The countryside. The American farm and the race that inhabits it. It is here that we find the repository of the extraordinary promise of our nation. It is here that we find a laboring class that respects itself more than the corresponding class of any other country, even England. Anyone coming among this class and violating its characteristic habits—thrift, courage, sobriety, hard work, faith, fairness, self-reliance—soon receives the most severe punishment a workingman can feel: the contempt of his own fellows. No one living in a rural district can altogether escape the indirect power of these influences. The necessity of education, the reality of religion, the purity of intentions, the consciousness of being a citizen with political power in a great Republic. These ideas are so profound among the laboring classes of our advancing frontier that no one, however low, utterly fails to be affected by them.”

The pressure Charles felt was painful, a throbbing stiffness that bulged against his pants. He put his hat on his lap. Elsa Jones had been his first. A hired girl on a neighboring farm. She barely got enough to eat, so the boys used to pay her with food. She said he was different. “I like you, Charlie. You're sweet. Don't need no payment from you.” Once in the loft of the barn, they had gone at it all afternoon, over and over again, and he kept becoming erect, and she moaned so loudly the cows below got nervous. It was as much relief as pleasure when he had felt himself entering Elsa.

Sarah sat
up in her seat. He could see the outline of her breasts, firm and prominent. He averted his eyes to the pulpit and tried again to concentrate.

“It is here, then, in the progress of our countrymen across the vast expanses of the continent that we find reason to fear not Sansculottism. Already, with the cooperation of our courts, we have had success in transporting the abandoned youngsters of our streets, or those whose depraved circumstances mock the very word
home,
to a new life in our rural districts. Some predicted that the inhabitants would resist the appearance of the children of our dangerous classes in their midst. But the readiness on the part of farmers to receive such children has been edifying.

“Indeed, an announcement through circulars or rural papers of the intention to supply children almost always brings a speedy response in the form of hundreds of applications from farmers and mechanics. On the day the band of children arrives, faces shining, boys and girls made clean and properly dressed, the greeting received is universally enthusiastic. Crowds wait at the station, and under the close supervision of the agent who has escorted the young travelers on their trip, the children are quickly disposed of for the night. The next day, a meeting of the people, irrespective of religious sympathies, is addressed by the agent who informs them of the benevolent objects of the Children's Aid Society, and relates, in brief form, the history of the children.

“Soon, prospective parents come forward. The childless are usually first. They are followed by those, moved by what they have seen and heard, who apply for children they hadn't planned on taking. There are also those who see the opportunity to gain an extra set of hands for their homestead while in the same stroke fulfilling the godly injunction to care for the least of our brethren.

“At length
, the business of charity is finished and the former wayfarers and waifs find themselves in comfortable and kind homes, with all the boundless advantages and opportunities of the western farmer's life about them.”

There were two coal stoves in the church, one in the front, the other by the vestibule, and the room had become exceedingly hot. The sweat rolled down Charles's back.

“I ain't got anything left,” he had told Elsa after the third time he had mounted her. She sat on his chest, bent over, and put her breasts next to his face. “I'll help you, Charlie.” She reached back and took him in her hand.

He shifted position. Stark poked him with his elbow. “It should be over soon, my boy.”

Brace was appealing for funds.

Charles glanced at Sarah. She seemed enrapt with Brace's words. A girl just entered into womanhood, the last awkwardness of youth gone. A flower come to blossom. But Sarah had more than Elsa's physical ripeness. She had grace and refinement; she was a lady as well as a woman. She and her uncle left by the center aisle. Charles had no chance to talk to her before she left.

A few weeks later, on New Year's Day, the city's traditional day for paying visits to friends and acquaintances, Charles stopped at the Ward home. It was a tall redbrick house with a fan-shaped window over the door. But the neighborhood was no longer fashionable. There was a grocery on the corner with pug-nosed Irish children loitering outside it. In the middle of the block, two houses had been subdivided into flats. Rags were stuck into broken windows. The smell of boiled cabbage hung in the air.

Inside, the Ward house vibrated with life and voices. The furniture was old but tasteful, the walls hung with portraits. When Charles came in, he saw Sarah on the other side of the room, surrounded by four young men. She looked at him. No sign of recognition in her eyes, she looked away.

Ward came over to him. “I don't believe I've had the pleasure,” he said.

“Several times, Mr. Ward. Twice at the offices of Stark and Evans, where I'm an assistant to Mr. Stark, we were together in the same room for the purposes of going over your account. And then, three weeks ago at Mr. Brace's lecture, I had the pleasure of being formally introduced. My name is Charles Bedford.”

“Quite
so.”

A servant helped Charles take off his coat. Ward didn't move. “Are you here on some matter of business, Charles?” “I'm here to wish you good cheer.”

“Quite so.”

Sarah didn't speak to him that day. Once he caught her looking at him from across the room. He didn't call again. He found a bagnio on Greene Street with a young Irishwoman who bore Sarah a fair resemblance. He made love to her every chance he could. He moved out of his room on Albany Street, a private room he had taken after leaving his shared quarters in the boardinghouse, and leased two rooms in a hotel off Union Square that catered “exclusively to gentlemen.” Soon after, Stark announced he was giving up the daily running of the office and retiring to his estate on the Hudson, above the Spuyten Duyvil. He told the assembled clerks that Charles would direct matters in his absence. “He is youthful,” said Stark, “but he is graced with discerning judgment and foresight, golden attributes that he has dug out of the coarse earth of experience.” The clerks stood silently, dismay on their faces. As he headed for the door, Stark paused and put an arm on Charles's shoulder. “Charlie,” he said, “the day we met, I said to myself, ‘Here's the boy I never had.' I thought from the start I saw something remarkable in you. Still do. I have great expectations, Charlie, great expectations.”

Charles gloried in his position for the first few weeks. He stood silently in the same corner of the Stock and Exchange Board as Stark had. He made no attempt to treat the older brokers as his peers. He knew they snickered behind his back, but he believed that they would eventually accept him as one of their own. Only gradually, as he adjusted to his new responsibilities and made a careful examination of the firm's books, did he realize that the laughter wasn't directed at his age but at his gullibility. Charles had imagined Stark as the captain of an old but seaworthy vessel. After years of guiding it through seas rough and smooth, the old man had decided to go ashore and put his ship in younger hands. But now Charles learned what the other brokers had known or suspected all along: The ship had been leaking for some time, and the captain had taken all his money and valuables, put them in his own skiff, and rowed a safe distance from his ship. In his place he had left a junior mate. If the ship went down, the captain would blame it on the mate's inexperience; if it survived, then perhaps at some later date he would come aboard and take command again.

At night,
alone in the office, Charles pored over the books and felt a growing admiration for the way Stark had dexterously skimmed off a significant portion of the profits for himself. He had been persistent rather than greedy, never looting outright a customer's account, simply adjusting the fractions in his own favor. Over the years, he had let some of the larger accounts leave the firm. They were ambitious for gain and apt to want a careful look at the books. Stark and Evans preferred volume, a roster of comfortable, reliable clients who looked for a steady income and were satisfied when it was provided.

Charles remembered the tears in Stark's eyes that first morning in Old Tom's. Was it possible that as far back as then, the old man had laid out his plan? Had Stark known from the beginning that the story of the upstate boyhood was all an invention? Had he even cared? Was he crying out of gratitude? Perhaps, as he listened to the story, he was formulating his own design for getting out before he was discovered, overwhelmed by the thought of escaping with both his profit and honor intact, a heaven-sent innocent to be sacrificed in his stead.

There was the possibility that Charles could expose the long history of illegal gain by Stark and Evans. But Charles understood this was precisely why Stark had put
him
in charge. Charles was like one of those faceless, nameless creatures whom Stark watched from his position at the window of the Stock and Exchange Board. The pack of hurrying, striving, pushing men, their nostrils filled with a first whiff of real wealth, they were like wolves on the trail of a wounded deer. Along with his peers on the Board, Stark disdained them. But unlike many of his colleagues, Stark also saw in the outsiders something irresistible, an inevitable triumph, a force of nature, a source of energy as new and as potentially revolutionary as the oil that was being drawn from the fields of Pennsylvania. Stark would never have walked down into that crowd to seek a partner. His fellow brokers would think him drunk or mad. But fate had put into his lap one of the ubiquitous nobodies. Whether his parents were Mormons or Millerites or Myrmidons, who cared? Here was a boy who could not only be molded and prepared to take over the firm but who possessed the appetite of his class, the belly-seated hunger that no gentleman could admit to. Such a boy would never destroy his own future by revealing peculations that would undermine the reputation of Stark and Evans, and send it into bankruptcy. He would play the cards he had been dealt and, grateful for finding himself in the game at all, would employ his skills and instincts with a concentrated desperation.

When the shock
of realizing how skillfully he had been manipulated wore off, Charles found himself without any bitterness toward Stark. After two months, he received a letter from the former director inviting him to take the train up to Spuyten Duy-vil. Stark wrote that he would pick him up at the station.

On the agreed-upon day, Charles walked up to the terminal on Chambers Street and boarded the Hudson River Railroad. An investment that Stark hadn't favored. He had been suspicious of railroads. “The public has a passion for them, no doubt,” he had said back in 1851, when Charles had timidly suggested that the firm take a position in railroad stocks. “But I see railroads as more a fashion than an institution. They'll never match the speed and convenience offered by steamboats, and there's something incurably vulgar about them.”

The cars were pulled by horses until they reached Thirtieth Street, where the clot of buildings and traffic thinned, and a locomotive was attached. The car was soon rocking along the track.

Charles read the
Tribune.
When he looked up, the train was roaring past the cluster of shantytowns that filled the wild precincts north of the city. Children stood on hilltops and waved as the train went by. Charles went back to his paper. In 1851, the Hudson River Railroad had reached Albany. Passenger growth was explosive. Finally, in the following year, Stark had allowed Charles to handle the firm's initial investments in railroads, small sums that had brought quadruple returns. Now it was rumored that Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose immense holdings in sailing vessels, ferry service, and steamships had earned him the title of “Commodore,” was liquidating his shipping interests to take control of the railroads. An intriguing prospect, if true, and Charles, having already decided to watch the Commodore carefully, had surreptitiously retained one of the grumpy Dutchman's clerks to share any information that might come his way.

Stark was
waiting for Charles by the train platform. They rode in Stark's coach a short distance to a local tavern, a dingy, dirty place owned by an Irishman named Ahearn who seemed overwhelmed by the presence of two gentlemen in his establishment. They had mutton chops, fried potatoes, and coffee with brandy in it. When they were done, Charles handed Stark an account book containing a summary of the last two months' transactions. Stark put on his spectacles and examined it. As he thumbed the pages, he said, “Well, Charles, what do you think?”