The Banished Children of Eve (81 page)

Morrison
arranged all the details of their journey, or at least saw to it that William Millar, his secretary, did. As manager of the Juniata Iron Works and as brother of the late William Foster, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Morrison was extended every possible courtesy by the lines they traveled to New York. They left Pittsburgh in the morning, via a mail train, in a closed compartment of their own. Lunch was brought to them. Jane ate nothing. She sobbed incessantly. Morrison enjoyed his food, but the closer they drew to their destination, the more he worried that a crowd of New York journalists lay in wait for them at the terminal in Jersey City. One or two might be bribed into silence, but as a pack the smell of scandal made them implacable. There was no one waiting for them on the platform except the clerk from the railroad's New York office, who saw them to the ferry and said that a coach would meet them on the other side and take them to the St. Nicholas, where arrangements had already been made. All went smoothly. They arrived on the 15th, just after dark. The maître d'hôtel met them at the desk and escorted them directly to the dining room. The hotel table was as grand as ever. Five courses were on the evening's card, beginning with shrimp-and-asparagus soup. They had barely begun to sip it when Jane had another fit of crying. The maître d'hôtel was most understanding. “The war has caused such tears to be shed far and wide,” he said. Morrison put a gold coin in the man's hand and nodded, as though the war were the reason Jane was dressed in widow's weeds.

They ate no breakfast the next morning. They left the hotel and entered a waiting coach that took them to the undertaker's. Morrison was glad for the harshness of the weather, the drab skies and ice-tipped winds that had the whole city traveling with collars up, mufflers wrapped tightly about the face, hats down over the eyes. There was no one at the entrance to the undertaker's. They hurried out of the coach and inside. Winterbottom, the undertaker, was waiting for them in the vestibule. He shook Morrison's hand, bowed to Jane, and escorted them into a dignified oak-paneled room with large chairs upholstered in green leather. It seemed to Morrison that it might as well have been a banker's office as an undertaker's. An attendant took their coats. Jane sat and cried into her handkerchief. The attendant returned with a silver tray on which were two cups of hot cocoa and a bowl of whipped cream. Morrison was about to take a cup when Winterbottom motioned for him to follow. They went out a side door, down a stone corridor, into a small cold antechamber.

Winterbottom
rubbed his hands. “Mr. Foster,” he said, “this is a most delicate matter.”

“You have handled it well,” Foster said.

“The man who brought your brother to the hospital implied he might go to the police. He said that, well, the gash in your brother's throat wasn't the accidental result of falling upon a piece of crockery. He said that it was deliberately self-inflicted; that your, brother told him so; and that it was a civic duty to report such an act to the authorities.”

“Where is this fellow now?”

“He has taken a trip to Rochester. His expenses were all paid, and he was given something additional. I saw to it.”

“I'm deeply grateful.” Morrison's words turned to puffs of steam. He shivered. “May I see my brother's body?”

“Of course,” Winterbottom said. He didn't move. “But it wasn't that fellow alone, I'm afraid. There was the coroner as well, and a nosing journalist from one of the city's most disgusting sheets. Showed up here several days ago making inquiries. Threatened to run a story about ‘the songster's suicide'—his phrase exactly—and I had no choice. He had to be paid. It was a substantial sum.”

“You did well and shall be remunerated in full, as I said in my note. You received it, didn't you?”

“Most definitely, but I was just making sure, Mr. Foster. I wish I could report that in the shadow of death all men shun duplicity or insincerity, but such, sir, has not been my experience.”

“Same
in every business,” Morrison said.

After he saw Stephen's body, Morrison fetched Jane and escorted her in. She fell to her knees and prayed a long time.

The shroud was drawn up to Stephen's chin, leaving only his face in view. Morrison was prepared to restrain her if she attempted to lift the sheet and expose the gruesome blue-and-yellow gash across Stephen's throat, the thick, irregular stitches adding to the horror, but after gazing at Stephen awhile she turned away and put her head on Morrison's shoulder, and he led her out. She had never questioned Morrison's explanation of her husband's death—that he died in a fall—and didn't do so now.

Morrison left Jane in the oak-paneled room and returned alone to Winterbottom's private office. He took out a blank bank draft and laid it on the desk. “What is the full amount for your services?” he asked.

Winterbottom handed him a bill. There were no items, just a total.

“Does this include shipment of the body?”

“Everything is included, Mr. Foster.”

Morrison filled in the draft and signed it. He handed it to Winterbottom, who stared at it a moment before folding it and putting it in his pocket.

“What should I do with the possessions that were on your brother's body?” Winterbottom said.

“What is there?”

“His clothing.”

“Dispose of it as you wish.”

“And this.” Winterbottom handed Morrison a small purse. Morrison snapped open the clasp. It contained a handful of copper coins and a folded scrap of paper. Morrison took out the paper. It looked as though it had been torn from the back of an envelope. On it were penciled five words:
Dear friends and gentle hearts.

“This I will keep,” Morrison said.

*

Morrison
took the coverlet from the bed and put it around his shoulders. He sat at the desk by the window and lit the oil lamp. He removed a thick folder from his briefcase. If he couldn't sleep, he would work. He had turned many a restless night to his advantage in this fashion, harnessing the anxiety or dread that drove him from bed to a useful purpose.

This past June, as Lee had approached Harrisburg with the obvious intent to destroy the Pennsylvania Railroad's bridge over the Susquehanna and break the link with the West, Morrison had lost all desire for sleep. He had worked night after night, ceaselessly reading maintenance reports and requisitions, until he had cleared his desk entirely of any business and started on his personal correspondence. He had written a long-overdue reply to Stephen's request for yet another loan. Now Morrison felt a mixture of regret and sadness at the memory of how he had turned his brother away. It was the last note he had ever sent Stephen, the final words between them.

Morrison opened the folder that had been given him by a director of the Pennsylvania. It contained a confidential account of the Pennsylvania's negotiations with an assortment of New Jersey railroads to unite their various tracks into a single consolidated line from Philadelphia to Jersey City. It would be managed, of course, by the Pennsylvania. Tantalus's prize was at last in reach: the fruit-laden bough of New York Harbor, an endless supply of freight and immigrants to be hauled west, an insatiable demand for the raw materials of the interior to be consumed or exported. There were ten pages of item-by-item estimates for the lading that could be expected from a consolidated line, ten more on the specific investments in track and equipment required to create such a line. An engineer's report was appended. Morrison skimmed over it to the last paragraph, which described the Jersey City terminal he and Jane had passed through yesterday. “Today it is nothing more than an oversized barn with a galvanized iron roof,” the engineer had written. “In the event of consolidation, a grander, more permanent terminal should be contemplated, a structure that would testify to the power and position of the Pennsylvania.”

Morrison pushed
aside the folder. There was no sound from Jane's room. She was either asleep or giving her grief a rest. He reached into the pocket of his robe and took out Stephen's purse, opened it, and withdrew the scrap of paper.
Dear friends and gentle hearts.
He wished for a moment he had some of Stephen's talent that he might compose an ode or song that used these words to open a tribute to his brother. But his abilities had never extended to the poetical or musical. “Morrison is the practical one, the Foster with sense,” his father said on more than one occasion, said it with a half smile on his face, as if amused.

Muffled sounds came from outside. Morrison stood and pulled back the drapes. It was dawn. The traffic was flowing once again, vehicles and pedestrians moving resolutely up and down the avenue. The relentless bustle of New York. He ran his hand across the sill. It was cracked and peeling, covered with soot. Poorly installed, poorly maintained. The hotel was barely ten years old and was already falling apart. Everything did unless you stayed on top of it, paid constant attention, repairing, cleaning, rebuilding. Poets and artists never worried about such matters. They smiled and sang, and left the work to the practical ones, ironmongers and smiths, merchants and businessmen, workmen and engineers, men of sense and responsibility. Morrison stuck the scrap of paper into the folder to mark the engineer's report. He would refer to it again, he decided. On the journey home, he would take a careful look at the Jersey City terminal, make some calculations, draw a preliminary sketch. It must be a useful, efficient structure, but the engineer was right. It should also be large and magnificent, able to withstand the assault of time, a monument to lasting things.

T
HAT
SUMMER OF
1863 is
etched indelibly into memory. It commenced with the news of Lee's movement north, which, to appropriate Dr. Johnson's phrase, “concentrated wonderfully” the attention of the nation. Unlike New York City, however, our town never harbored doubts about the outcome. We all believed that right would triumph, as it did, and the threat of a Confederate invasion led not to panic but to a new burst of patriotic fervor. A wave of volunteers flowed into the recruiting hut beside the town hall. My eldest brother, Frederick, who was nineteen at the time, was among them. How I remember the day he and his comrades departed! They marched in loose formation to the terminal on Newark Avenue with the German Society Band at their head. We small boys trailed behind. Our hearts beat with the knowledge that these warriors were not the stuff of distant legends or ancient history, but our brothers and cousins and uncles, and though they arrived too late to participate in the glorious triumph at Gettysburg, we were sure that the very word of their approach helped put Lee to flight.

Two events from that time stand out in my mind. The first was a murder that took place in the old Elysian Fields, the report of which spread like cholera through the town, striking terror everywhere. The sacred precincts of play had become home to the sin of Cain! Outside the valiant contest of war, and sometimes even in it, the taking of any life is a gruesome transgression, but when the killing is murder, and not murder of the ordinary sort, a single shot, a solitary stab, but a brutal and ferocious assault that leaves the corpse unrecognizable, an icy chill enters the human heart. Of such a type was the murder in the fields.

For me
it was made all the more disturbing by the fact that the corpse of the slain man rested in the basement of our house, in which my father maintained the town coroner's office. I was cursed with nightmares and shivered in my bed. My mother came and stroked my head. She said that the slain man as well as his slayer were undoubtedly Yorkers. She meant to comfort me, but instead inspired the fear that lurking in every corner of the night were Yorkers of murderous intent. My sleep remained disturbed!

As great as was my dread, it was insufficient to keep me or my comrades away from the very fields that haunted our dreams and that our parents had expressly forbidden us to visit. Drawn rather than repelled by the prospect of danger, as boys will always be, and undeterred by our parents' threats of punishment, we ventured into the Fields, to the very area in which the murder had occurred.

The hour was near dusk. The shadows in the woods turned deep and ominous. Running up the path to Sybil's Cave, we panted from a mixture of fear and physical exertion. We tarried at the cave's entrance nary a minute but flew back down the path, each inspired by the desire not to be the last in the pack. I led the way, running as with winged feet. I hurtled so fast that I was unable to negotiate a turn and, sliding on a muddy patch, crashed into the brush. I scrambled frantically to my feet. As I did, my hand closed quite fortuitously about the stem of a baseball bat, as though Fate itself had decreed that I should not miss it. With bat in hand, I resumed the race, eventually regaining my place in the lead.