The Lockwood Concern (9 page)

his earliest years in Swedish Haven now owed him money or would in all likelihood someday want to borrow from him. Moreover, in doing business with Moses Lockwood they had had to reveal some sharp practices of their own; and what Moses Lockwood did not know of his own knowledge, he could easily find out from his father-in-law, the alternating chief burgess, who possessed a complete record of the citizens' sins. It was time to concede that Moses Lockwood had reached a new level of importance, that put him out of range of cobblers and blacksmiths, bricklayers and harness makers. Now his dealings were in money, real money, or in its mysterious, capricious ghost, Credit; and the citizens were finding it difficult to remember him as a young roundsman, going about the town in the night, trying doors and keeping the peace. He had his defenders, if he had no real friends. Whatever he had been or whatever he had done in Fort Penn, he had given good value as a roundsman and in his other enterprises; when he agreed to do something, he did it, promptly, efficiently, and to the extent he contracted for. He was firm in money matters and there was no doubt that he took advantage of his official positions to create business opportunities for himself; but none of this was against the rules that applied in business or politics, and it all gained him respect, the respect for the strong-growing-stronger that silences ethical considerations. He joined a church, attended Sunday services with his wife, and contributed increasing amounts as he prospered. Every man in the borough had his own personal set of ethics, and those who were possibly in a position to be critical of Moses Lockwood's made a compromise: Moses Lockwood was prospering, perhaps at the cost of strict adherence to a code of honorable conduct, but he was behaving himself, living respectably, and doing so despite and practically in defiance of the man he had been on first arriving in Swedish Haven. He had come to town with a pistol in his pocket, alone and unknown, and he had been set upon by a thief with a dagger; he had killed the thief, he stayed in the town, he took work, he married, he prospered. The second killing was a tragedy of errors, but could not be held against Moses Lockwood. Nor was it, except secretly by every man in the town. In their very midst, in daily association, he was an outcast. No one wanted Moses Lockwood's friendship after he had killed twice, and the citizens' efforts to hide that fact - sometimes from themselves - were soon apparent to him, with the curious result that he became more and more devoted to his family, his wife and three children. Every day he tried to make money for them, and most days he was successful. In 1861 he organized a company of militia, uniformed and equipped out of his own pocket, and as Lockwood's Rifles they were absorbed into the 70th Pennsylvania Infantry. Lieutenant Moses Lockwood was home three months after leaving Swedish Haven, badly wounded in the chest and disfigured by the loss of the lower half of his left ear. He had participated in the battle and the rout at Bull Run. He was past fifty years of age, had learned that war is for young men, but was determined that one young man, his son Abraham, would see none of it. Abraham, now twenty, was at the University of Pennsylvania, where the members of his fraternity were agitating for the mass enlistment of the entire chapter. Moses Lockwood wrote his son: You have seen what can happen in one battle. I am a comical figure with my cropped ear but not so comical when I try to breathe. I beg of you to heed my advice. Do not enlist now. Finish your schooling for it is to be a long war. Our troops do not possess the fighting spirit of the rebels because the latter are defending there home land & they will fight us to the last man. This war is certain to last another year. Time enough a year from now to enlist. Maybe 2 yrs if England & France join in on the side of the rebels. Also your Mother & Sisters will need you if anything happens to me. You would be head of the Family then. Yr loving Father, Moses Lockwood. When it became apparent that his prediction of a two year war was optimistic, Moses Lockwood persuaded his son to apply for a commission. He then, unbeknownst to Abraham, got in touch with Jacob Baltz, member of the House of Representatives for the Lantenengo County district, and talked straight: Baltz would see that Abraham got a commission promptly and was assigned to duty with the War Department in Washington. If this was not done, and done promptly, Moses Lockwood would use all his money and his new prestige as a wounded soldier to run against Baltz. Baltz was amenable, and Abraham Lockwood, second lieutenant, served his country as an aide to a general in the Quartermaster Corps. He was particularly useful as a handsome young guest at the social functions in the foreign embassies. His French was more than adequate to these occasions, and he was a welcome relief from the aging colonels and generals who represented the North at the diplomatic balls. He knew that he had not been chosen accidentally, but he bore his father no resentment. In 1865 he was still alive, and that could not be said of more than half the men in his fraternity. Abraham Lockwood, not slender but thin, not humorous but witty, not affectionate but concupiscent, had grown from boyhood to manhood in the atmosphere of withdrawal and vigilance that followed his father's acquittal on the man slaughter charge. Abraham himself was by nature outgoing and gregarious, and he was free to play with boys his own age; but every day he saw his father's derringer lying beside his watch-and-chain, notecase, pocket handkerchief, small change, and he knew that in the desk drawer at the office and bureau at home his father kept full-size "horse pistols," always loaded. The business of locking up at night was not a casual routine; and at the new house, after the spike-topped wall was built, Abraham Lockwood's playmates repeated the fortress jokes their fathers made. He was sometimes proud, sometimes ashamed of the fact that his father had shot two men to death; no other father had participated in a shooting, and Abraham Lockwood was conscious of his playmates' admiration of his father; but it was his father, not theirs, and he did not like his father to be so very different from other fathers. It would have embarrassed him, too, if his playmates had known that in the privacy of the home his father was gentle, considerate, and generous; while conventional sternness and aloofness and overt cruelty kept most of his playmates in continual fear of their own fathers. At the University, away from his family, Abraham Lockwood identified himself with the campus social life rather than with the bookish. He had a large allowance, spent it freely on his wardrobe and the entertainment of his new friends, and the money enabled him to participate in games of chance for comparatively high stakes. He learned to play whist, and was invited to join a club at which the new duplicate whist was played. "Membership in this club was a major social triumph for Abraham Lockwood of Swedish Haven; the other members were undergraduates whose families were the bon ton of Philadelphia and nearby Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. As merely a good whist player Abraham Lockwood could have been ignored; the invitation signified the members' unanimous approval of Abraham Lockwood as a good fellow. He wore the club badge, a golden scarf pin in the shape of a question mark, like a decoration, which indeed it was; to be made a member of The Ruffes was a more promising augury for the post-college future than his membership in Zeta Psi. It had been taken for granted at Zeta Psi and among The Ruffes that Abraham Lockwood - handsome, clever, well supplied with funds - was related to certain other Lockwoods of substance. He seemed to take for granted that everyone would assume he was one of those Lockwoods; consequently he was not asked the direct question and was not compelled to give the kind of evasive answer that would immediately have made him suspect. His only lie, in that respect, was to say offhand that most of his people had gone to Yale, although his father had not. In a sense he was telling a half truth; the closer descendants of 1630-Watertown Robert Lockwood had gone to Yale in abundance, and it was not then or ever established that Abraham Lockwood was not somehow connected with 1630-Watertown Robert. In any event it seemed altogether likely to the members of Zeta Psi and more particularly to the members of The Ruffes that Abraham Lockwood, son of the upstate magnate, was all they made him out to be a gentleman. The Ruffes, who were twelve in number, had an arrangement with a Miss Adamson that made her, in effect, the club's mistress. She had a house in Juniper Street where she lived alone with a maid. Unlike the Greek-letter fraternities and the upperclassmen's societies, The Ruffes had no secrets of ritualistic nature; even the name was quite obvious to anyone who had ever heard of the game of whist; but it was understood by the members that anything and everything said or done during gatherings of the club was not to be talked about with outsiders, and the arrangement with Phoebe Adamson was in the same esoteric category as the stakes the members played for. Under the arrangement, any member of the club could go to Phoebe whenever he, felt the need, and she would accommodate him. If too many more than two-members desired to be accommodated, Phoebe would dispatch her maid to bring in other girls who were on her carefully selected list, and who were regularly employed as hotel chambermaids, housemaids, and ales ladies in the stores and who wished to augment their salaries. Phoebe, through her own maid, could round up a dozen young women in a couple of hours. On such occasions Abraham Lockwood was splendid company. He was extraordinarily well equipped by nature and immediately and inevitably was nicknamed The Stud Horse. His fellow members of the club would time him with their watches to test how long he could postpone orgasm; and when Phoebe was introducing a new girl, the members would gather around to watch her amazement when she saw him stripped. Away from Phoebe's he was discretion itself; his dignified conduct was given credulity by his appearance, his blameless complexion, his innocent wavy locks, his unworldly look of slightly bewildered friendliness. "It's hard to believe it," his fellow members would say - and Abraham Lockwood himself became one of the few club secrets. His army assignment in Washington was a post-graduate course in the amenities he had so quickly mastered at Penn. His Pennsylvania Dutch was offensive to the German-speaking diplomats, but he at least could understand a great deal of their conversations; and at the University he had liked and done well in French. Having been partly bilingual since boyhood, he was less self-conscious about using a foreign language than his fellow students; consequently he seemed a more alert, interested student and, in turn, his professors reciprocated with an interest in him. His accent and intonations needed practice, but he could understand and make himself understood for hours at a stretch. This was not an unimportant attribute; any effort, large or small, that succeeded in making the French nation hesitate to help the Confederacy was worthwhile. Abraham Lockwood was fed harmless military information to be passed along at the parties he attended, in the hope that it would be carried back to the French embassy. There was no way to estimate the efficaciousness of this minor propaganda scheme, but the French stayed out of the conflict. Abraham Lockwood was the more effective because the highly sophisticated French diplomats regarded him as a completely ingenuous Yankee, who possessed some small skill at cards but was otherwise little more than a dancing man in a blue uniform. One result of his Washington experience was Abraham Lockwood's discovery that Philadelphia was not the capital of the world and the Philadelphians, even the families that were represented in The Ruffes, were not taken at their own valuation when they journeyed away from home. It was true that in diplomatic-society small talk Abraham Lockwood was often asked about individual Philadelphians who were acquaintances of the foreigners, but it was as individuals and not as Philadelphians that they had made an impression. Abraham Lockwood never forgot this lesson, and its immediate effect was to keep him from making a fool of himself. No young woman in Swedish Haven had attracted the young buck as a suitable nubile prospect. He had gone to Washington with the thought that when the war was over he would live in Philadelphia and in due course marry some sister of some University friend. He discarded the plan after he had begun to see Philadelphia from another perspective, Philadelphia was only Philadelphia, and a marriage of convenience could turn into a lifetime of boredom, convenient only as a means to achieve high standing in a city that had begun to disappoint him. With this thought came two others: in Washington he realized that he had not often been invited to visit the homes of his fellow members of The Ruffes, and that on the rare occasions when he dined with his clubmates' families, the daughters of the house had not been present. He slowly found an explanation for this careful oversight: his antics at Phoebe Adamson's. The other thought, which came as he projected his plans into the post-war future, evolved into the scenes that would take place if he got himself engaged to a Germantown girl and there was an exchange of visits by the two sets of parents. Moses Lockwood in his middle fifties had acquired dignity through success and suffering and reticence through his fears, but he had no polish and he did have, literally, half an ear. He was bothered by phlegm, and his efforts to clear his throat stopped conversation until he had caught the bothersome wad and spat it, when luck would have it, into one of the brass spittoons that were in nearly every room in the house. When there was no spittoon he would leave the room, saying, "I gah geh rih oh this," and get rid of it. Abraham Lockwood's mother could read and write and play a few favorite hymns on the organ, but she had never been to Philadelphia, never read any book but the Bible, never seen a play, never danced, and never had guests for a meal. In the red brick house she had employed her first help, a woman to do the laundry; but despite her husband's prosperity she did all the cooking, cleaning, mending and fancywork. Abraham Lockwood's sisters took Louis Antoine Godey's Lady's Book, and they had been to Reading and Gibbsville, but they would add neither beauty nor social charm to the hypothetical visit of the imaginary Germantown girl's parents.