The Lockwood Concern (28 page)

"You'll never get the truth out of your old man," said Ned O'Byrne. "Neither will Lalie out of her old man. But it stands to reason that Judge Fenstermacher went there with a chip on his shoulder. He's the one that went to Swedish Haven, not your old man to Lebanon." "My father's pretty clever sometimes. He could outfox the judge, if he wanted to. But I wonder if he wanted to." "Oh. You think your old man was against this marriage?," said O'Byrne. "Why?" "Ah, that's where he's clever, my father," said George Lockwood. "He never lets anybody know what he's thinking, or why he does anything." O'Byrne looked quickly at his friend; it was the first time in their four years' acquaintance that he had heard George Lockwood speak of anyone in such tones of innocent admiration. It silenced O'Byrne's ready irreverence.

Agnes Wynne was not a member of the main, Thomas Wynne line, but as a second cousin and the only living female of her generation she partook of the benefits and protection that went with the name. Her father was always taken care of with some job in the Wynne Coal Company that did not require a technical knowledge of coal mining. He was pay master at one colliery, purchasing agent at another, assistant superintendent in charge of outside-surface-work at two of the larger operations. Before he was thirty years old he realized that the name Wynne, that had got him his jobs, also kept him from enjoying the complete trust of the men he worked with. The company spy was to be found in all grades of coal mining personnel, and while the employees he dealt with were not actively hostile to this gentle, amiable man, they never could forget that he was a Wynne. This, of course, was understandable when the jobs he held kept him in daily contact with the men who worked with their hands, but conditions did not greatly change when he became assistant superintendent. A superintendent always had his eye on the colliery next above, and the superintendents of the largest collieries were ambitious for general managerships and vice presidencies. Every superintendent's secretary always knew more about a colliery than Assistant Superintendent Theron B. Wynne, the cousin of Old Tom. But there was no place else to go, and Theron Wynne knew it, and so he went fishing at the company dams and wherever he could find an unpolluted stream; he painted his pictures of the breakers and the culm banks, and once or twice a year he would be off to Wilkes-Barre or Gibbsville for a three-day drunk. One advantage of being a Wynne was that he could tell his boss beforehand that he was taking a few days off on private business, and since he was not indispensable, no questions were asked. On his return he would always have nice presents for his wife and for Agnes, and Bessie Wynne would thank God that no harm had come to this defeated man, with his frail body and his awkward efforts to make people fond of him. He could tell Bessie, and no one else, that in college he had wanted to become a missionary, but his older cousin was footing the bills for his education and expected him to go to work for the Wynne Coal Company. He had failed Cousin Tom while still in college, when a physician said he could never work inside a mine and should therefore abandon the thought of studying to be a civil engineer specializing in mining. The defeat of Theron Wynne was accomplished early in life, for he had also failed himself for the same reason, health, that prevented his fulfilling his secret ambition to bring Christianity and the Presbyterian doctrines to the black man in Africa. Sometimes, watching the men quitting the mine at the end of a shift, Theron Wynne sardonically observed that the faces and hands of the miners were blackened as dark as any he would have preached to in the jungles; their faces were as black and their resistance to his preaching would have been as firm; but Theron Wynne made no attempt to convert the Irish and Lithuanians and Poles. His own faith was shaky, as frail as his body. As the years passed and he did not die, he discovered that his constitution had acquired the habit of staying alive and become equal to the few demands he put upon it. He could walk many miles through the woods if he did not hurry, and his semiannual debauches in Wilkes-Barre and Gibbsville seemed to exact no more than a temporary distress. Even his conscience ceased to trouble him two days after he got home and was once again in the routine of respectability. He loved Bessie and was gratefully fascinated by her love for him and for her having made him a fully functioning man. But his love for Bessie was not comparable to the love he breathed for his daughter. The mystery of Agnes Wynne had no beginning; he accepted as fact the evidence that by making love to Bessie he had started a life that grew until it was ready to be expelled from Bessie's body, but from his first sight of this thing that was his child he understood that the changes in himself had already begun; he did not know when. Nor care. In a little while his first sight of her was also lost in the past, as had been the love-making, as had been Bessie's uncertainty and then conviction that she was carrying a child. The presence of his daughter in his life enabled him to admit that he had not wanted a son; he had been ashamed to admit that even to himself while Bessie was carrying Agnes, but he could confess to himself after Agnes was born that he had been afraid his child would be a boy. When a boy grew up he would expect his father to be strong and forceful and talented in ways that Theron B. Wynne was not. That boy would have been embarrassed by his father. The possibility that a second child would be a male was less frightening to Theron Wynne; Agnes would be there to stand between her father and the critical, disappointed glances of her brother. But the breeding capacities of Bessie and Theron Wynne were exhausted in Agnes, and she remained unique in her father's experience. Bessie Wynne did all the hard things that were necessary to the raising of the child; the disciplining, the punishments. But Bessie in her wisdom and contentment was satisfied to have Theron appear to be benevolent, provident, loving, as though in his place as father and husband he were above the hard things. He in turn conceded nearly all authority to Bessie. "It's no use going to your father," she would say to the child. "He's as strict as I am." The child was taught not to test her father's strictness, and the myth became in a practical sense a reality: Agnes believed that her father was the true source of strength in the family, and his favors and amiability were made to seem like rewards. It was a quiet household, wherever they happened to be living, in whatever Company house they inhabited. Until Theron was an assistant superintendent the Wynnes had no hired girl; once a week they had a woman in to do the washing, and Agnes was brought up to help with the household chores. Later there was always a hired girl as well as a Monday-and-Tuesday woman for the washing and ironing. Theron paid no rent in the Company houses, and nearly everything he needed for himself and his family could be bought wholesale through the Company stores - food, clothing, their Chickering upright piano, his fishing tackle, his art supplies. Coal for their stove and furnace was delivered free of charge, and Theron Wynne had the use of a horse and buggy or cutter as a privilege of his rank. The social standing of the family was doubly automatic; they were Wynnes, and Theron Wynne's jobs were always considered office jobs. Agnes was sixteen before her second cousin Tom Wynne got what he called a real good look at her, and what he saw he liked. "Theron, you know who this girl looks like? She looks like Aunt Agnes." "Well, that's who we named her after, Cousin Tom." "You look like your grandmother, girl. Pity you never saw her. You remember Theron's mother, Bessie?" "I sure do, Cousin Tom. But I don't want you to spoil this one telling her she resembled Grandmother Wynne, Don't want to turn her head." "They won't turn this one's head, will they, girl? You look to me like a pretty sensible young lady. Where you got her in school, Bessie?" "Here. Hilltop High School." "Uh-huh. What are you taking, girl?" "Which course? The four-year. I'm a junior." "I'm in favor of that. You intend to give her a year away at boarding school, Theron?" "After she finishes High, we might." "You didn't say what subjects you're taking, girl." "The regular four-year course. This year I'm taking geometry. Plane geometry. Latin - Cicero, that is - English, first-year French. High School Civics. And drawing." "Keep you busy? You passing everything?" "Yes sir," said the girl. "Tell Cousin Tom," said Theron Wynne. "She has the highest marks of any girl in her class, and the best of anybody, boys or girls, in Latin and French." "Conduct? I guess I don't have to ask that." "Oh-all right, I guess," said the girl. "Tell him, he wants to know," said Theron Wynne. "She has the highest mark in Deportment, too. That's Conduct. She never had anything but 'A,' all through High." "I knew it. You can tell by looking at her. Theron, I recommend you and Bessie don't wait till she finishes Hilltop High. Send her to boarding school. Young lady, will you excuse yourself while your father and mother and I have a talk?" "Yes sir. Excuse me," said Agnes, leaving them. "Do you realize this is the only female Wynne of her age? Her generation. I'm going to do something for this girl. I like the cut of her jib. Good manners. Neat and clean. And I had no idea she was so smart. You pick out a good school, and I'll foot the bills." "Oh, Cousin Tom..." Bessie Wynne began to cry. "Hell, I put her father through Lafayette and he didn't disappoint me the way some other relations have. You know who I'm talking about. My own son, yet to do an honest day's work. The money he cost me, I'd like to see my money do some good for a change. You pick out a good school and we'll sit down and figure out the cost and I'll put that money in the Hilltop bank, in case some Union hooligan takes a shot at me." "Oh, they wouldn't do that, Cousin Tom," said Bessie Wynne. "They wouldn't, eh? You must think the Mollies are a thing of the past. Maybe you don't hear about them so much anymore, but I never go anywhere without a pistol in my pocket, let me tell you. The Molly Maguires had big families, don't forget, and my brother Albert helped to hang some of them... Anyhow, you pick out a school for Agnes, and Theron, you write me a letter." He brought his voice down to a whisper. "Don't want her to get interested in boys. Hilltop High School. Boys, Wrong ideas. Calf-love. Marry some Schwakie." "I know," said Bessie Wynne. "Well, you decide," said Cousin Tom. "And Theron, I'll hear from you in a day or two." "You bet, Cousin Tom," said Theron Wynne. "And I wish I knew how to-" "Good, sensible girl. And has looks, into the bargain," said Cousin Tom Wynne. "I have to be going." Agnes was taken out of Hilltop High after junior year and enrolled at Miss Dawson's in Overbrook, where, like herself, most of the boarders were girls who had had a year or two in a public high school. The day pupils were the daughters of nearby Overbrook, Chestnut Hill, and Germantown families, and many of them would be leaving Miss Dawson's for New England and Southern boarding schools for the final two years. As a result there was a constant turnover in the student body that made life interesting for the girls but did not make for efficiency among the teachers. The good ones did not stay long. "This place is like the Broad Street Station," said one teacher in parting. But to Agnes Wynne and her parents and to the citizens of Hilltop and the other coal towns Miss Dawson's was a fashionable finishing school that put the finishing school stamp on its girls and set them apart from the girls who were going to Wilson and Goucher and Hood and Bryn Mawr, the bluestockings, who went to college because they wanted to go into competition with men. Cousin Tom Wynne, for all his admiration of Agnes's brains, did not volunteer to continue her education, although she graduated from Miss Dawson's at the head of her class. She had made good, and it was time for her to come home and wait for a suitable husband. Cousin Tom Wynne sponsored her by giving a dance at his house, to which were invited all the coal and lumber and beer and whiskey and legal and medical plutocracy of the area. George Lockwood was not invited to the dance. Swedish Haven, although it was only a few miles from Gibbsville, was not considered to belong to the coal region. It was the last Pennsylvania Dutch town on the way northward, and Gibbsville was the first coal town. It made no difference that George Lockwood was only half Pennsylvania Dutch; he belonged to Swedish Haven, whatever his name. In Swedish Haven you heard Pennsylvania Dutch spoken more than English; in Gibbsville even the families of German ancestry were letting the patois die, while they adapted themselves to the New England Yankee influence that had always prevailed. George Lockwood, of Swedish Haven, got to the Thomas Wynne dance because he was a Princeton man who was in the Wynneville neighborhood for a Princeton wedding. It was the year after the breaking of his engagement to Lalie Fenstermacher. He was living at home, getting started on the task of taking over his father's business interests. Abraham Lockwood systematically acquainted George with the real estate holdings in the town and the farm properties in the rural area; the bank, the distillery, the coal-dredging operations in the river, and the portfolio of shares in distant enterprises. Instead of a liberal allowance Abraham Lockwood put his son on the Lockwood payroll and gave him a desk in the Lockwood & Company office. Father and son walked to work together every day and had noon dinner together at their table in the Exchange Hotel. By degrees Abraham Lockwood transferred responsibility and then ownership of minor properties to his son, and in a year's time George Lockwood was already a well-to-do man in his own right. He was also, without realizing it, becoming more and more involved in the affairs of Lockwood & Company and in the advancement of the Lockwood Concern. He was a beloved son, in whom his father was well pleased. His mother could not stand the sight of him; he was replicating the original Abraham Lockwood with an eager innocence that she found as distasteful as though he had set out to taunt her. Adelaide Lockwood was sickened and then sick as she watched her son adopt his father's mannerisms and try to overtake him, sometimes successfully, in cleverness. Abraham Lockwood was delighted and proud when George produced schemes to save money or make it; he would overlook the unsuccessful ones and over praise the effectual. And always the father consciously and the mother vaguely were observing the son's seduction by the Concern. This thing, whatever it was, that Abraham was trying to engineer was no longer resisted by Adelaide. She had given up on George, and she was only half-hearted in her attempts to hold on to Penrose. The younger son, now a freshman at Princeton, would succumb to George's influence as George had succumbed to his father's, and Adelaide Lockwood caught one cold after another until a particularly heavy congestion developed into pleurisy and death. She could look back and find only one triumph over the Lockwoods: she had made her father-in-law take down that wall. Not a man or woman in Swedish Haven knew that it was not pus in the chest that had caused her death. There was no diagnosis of hatred or chagrin or frustration, and of the three tall men who stood at