The Time Traveler's Almanac (158 page)

In the cobbled courtyard, McVay would be waiting to take the horses, a lean grim mountaineer with a crooked leg. The leg had been crippled in a mill accident, and because McVay had a family, a job as hostler and janitor had been found for him. If he had been killed, his widow would have received a small sum every payday until the oldest boy was old enough to work in the mill. When a mill hand grew too old or too infirm to work, the son or son-in-law who took him in found his pay envelope somewhat augmented each week for so long as the old man lived. No one starved in Dappling’s town. No one had any luxuries, either, except for the people in the big houses on Main Street. And Dappling.

The townspeople were content with that arrangement. They were proud, illiterate people who made a point of asking for no more than they felt they had earned, and they were in fact more prosperous and lived more comfortably (if perhaps with a little less freedom) than their cousins who lived in mountain cabins. They were all people indigenous to the mountains, some still owning steep remnants of the land granted to ancestors in recognition of service as soldiers in the Revolution. There were no foreigners in Dappling’s mill. He had observed with fastidious disgust the consequences of Pittsburgh’s resort to immigrant labor: the swarms of evil-smelling clownish peasants, gabbling in strange tongues and devouring loathsome foods, creating squalid enclaves that reproduced with hideous fidelity the degenerate East European or Mediterranean villages that had spawned them. Dappling would have none of it. Who would be squire where the tenants were the likes of these?

No, he would forego becoming a great man, if becoming a great man entailed such things. In his lifetime, at least, things would not change here. This neat prospering town where dwelt contented respectful citizens; this bustling profitable mill where free Americans labored; these wooded hills surrounding his elegant great house: these were what he prized; these he would keep. These and his family.

His days were so ordered that there was time for each of them: he would be in his office (he still called it a counting house, a small room darkly furnished in mahogany and green plush) until noon precisely, sitting deliberate and magisterial behind the broad desk, guiding the affairs of his mill with a concentration of attention indistinguishable from love. That part of his life that belonged to the mill was the mill’s absolutely. But with the first sound of the noon whistle he was at the door, and before the sound of the whistle had died the chestnuts were in motion, retracing the morning’s journey. With the closing of the door, Dappling shut business out of his mind until tomorrow; the rest of the day belonged to the estate and the family.

He always felt a lift in his spirits as the buggy approached the gates of the manor, an emotion identical with the one he felt as he neared the mill in the morning. Twice each day on six days of the week he enjoyed this feeling of pleasurable anticipation. He relished each morning’s work, the solid satisfaction of bringing order to confused situations, the pride in his honest profit from his honest product. He relished equally the afternoons: a farmer’s lunch, a change into boots and breeches, and then into the outdoors – sometimes afoot and sometimes riding – to verify that all went well with his acres.

There were about twenty thousand of them, forest mostly, lofty virgin stands of oak and walnut steeply rising above valleys where swift cold streams ran. Where the land was reasonably flat, there were wheat and cornfields, and on steeper clearings grew lush pasturage for the fat cattle and blooded horses that won ribbons for Dappling at the fair. He liked to take his big gray gelding on a tour of the fields on a summer afternoon, using not the farm roads but his private bridle paths, cantering through the silent forest on a crooked course that took him from the stable down to the fat fields of the bottomland, thence upward as far as the high mountain meadow, and from there back again to his house in the last hour before sunset. He would emerge from the trees at the top of the home meadow, whose long slope ran from the edge of the woods down to Dappling Road. There he always pulled up to absorb the view for a few minutes: in the foreground the dairy herd making its way in a peaceable file towards the barn for the evening milking; then the road; and then, beyond treetops, his house, solid, permanent, and shapely, on its broad expanse of lawn. The best part of the day was still to come. If the gelding was not overheated, Dappling would give him his head and, with deliberate theatricality, thunder up to the stable at a dead run. More often than not, Emily would be there waiting for him.

His Emily, his sunshine; the radiance that lighted his life, the small granddaughter whom he loved with an intensity of devotion that sometimes – as he was well aware – made him appear faintly ridiculous. He doted; and was aware that his doting was a cause of laughter, and did not care, this staid industrialist who prized his dignity above most things. He saw in this merry child a recreation of her grandmother, the adored wife who had died young and whose loss inflicted a wound that had remained as raw as the day it was new through all the years until Emily’s birth.

He had remained fond enough of his son Sam and never been so unhinged by grief as to blame the boy because his birth had killed his mother; nonetheless, he had been more a dutiful than a loving father. But if he did not cheer at Sam’s triumphs, neither did he chide him for his failures, and they did not quarrel. They did not embrace, either, and Sam no more filled the empty part of Dappling’s life than did the mill and the estate. All three were good things, important to him and sources of satisfaction, but it was not until the baby’s birth that they fell snugly into place as parts of a life that seemed now to be whole and unflawed. He was able at last to love Sam as a son and to become fond of Sam’s wife Olivia, the aristocrat Sam had fetched home to the mountains from a decaying Main Line mansion.

Sam, for his part, not only loved his father, he admired him above all men. He accounted himself very lucky, did plain decent Sam, with the great Henry Dappling his father and the beautiful Olivia his wife. Sam knew his limitations, knew that his father and his wife had quicker, keener minds than his own. At Harvard, where his father had been graduated
cum laude
after an indolent and sociable four years, Sam had had to toil mightily for his Gentleman’s Cs, and he was never able to comprehend at all the formidable books that his wife incessantly read. But what he learned he remembered, and Dappling was a patient teacher. Sam had come to be of value in the mill and on the farm, and when the proper time came round (in ten years, Dappling thought, or fifteen), he would be fit to command both. His ways were not his father’s ways, but Dappling had gradually come to realize that Sam’s pleasant, almost diffident orders were carried out with as much alacrity as his own, and undoubtedly more cheerfully. The men respected and to some degree feared Dappling, but they were fond of Sam. They were beginning to respect him, as well; and a few, who had failed him in one way or another, had learned that there were times when he, too, was to be feared.

They dined early, so that Emily could eat with the family. Each evening as they entered the dining room, Mrs. McVay would pop Emily in through the other door, starched and ruffled, fragrant from her bath, her small face serious with the effort of making a ladylike entrance, her eyes on Dappling. It was a game. If Dappling’s expression did not change, she was able to make her way to her chair with suitable gravity; but if he winked, or permitted the corner of his mouth to twitch with an incipient grin, she broke into giggles and ran to him to be picked up and deposited in her chair. She was in fact a beautiful child, with a regularity of feature and a shapeliness of the underlying bone that indicated an inevitable growth into a beautiful woman. She glowed with health; the round cheeks bloomed, the blue eyes sparkled. Merriment bubbled always just beneath the surface of her mood of the moment, so that even when she was irritated or sullen, the bad behavior somehow gave the impression of being no more than a pose. It was not to be doubted that all of her life people would be charmed by her and forgive her almost any offense. She was a delightful small person and seemed so not only to her besotted grandfather but to the whole populace of Dappling’s demesne. In the row houses the grannies were already worrying about a suitable husband being found for her, and eminent fiddlers from the mountain cabins often turned up at the door with tenders of music to be played for the Missy. These were not sycophantish people; they felt a very genuine affection for her. Everyone did.

They ate the food of the region, roast beef or fried pork or game, with cornbread and boiled greens. But the plain food was served on delicate china and eaten with monogrammed silver; the napery was heavy linen, snowy white. Olivia’s code of manners had not been relaxed by removal to the west. The Dapplings were gentlefolk, after all, and if they had tended to live coarsely during the years when the house was without a chatelaine, it was only her duty, now that she was mistress, to set things back on the correct path. Dappling was amiable about it, and the adoring Sam, as anxious to please as a puppy, pretended great enthusiasm for her amendments to their style of living. They drew the line at formal dinner wear, but were agreeable to changing from outdoor clothes for dinner, and Olivia settled for that.

The men ate hugely, minding their table manners to set an example for Emily and to please Olivia. The conversation would no doubt have surprised a chance visitor: Dappling’s education had been excellent, and he was that rarity among industrialists, a man who loved books. Olivia, too, was a reader. She had had no more than the education considered appropriate for females of her class and time – genteel reading, manners, a little music – but she had very early displayed, to the utter astonishment of the improvident sportsmen and flighty belles who comprised her family, a formidable intellect, an attribute that the clan found as exotic as the ability to charm snakes, and about as desirable in a lady. Her father had leaped at the chance to marry her off to rich Sam Dappling, who was, although perhaps not out of the very top drawer, a lad much to the old man’s liking, a good shot, bold at a jump, well-tailored, and in no way bookish. Indeed, he felt a certain sympathy for Sam, anticipating that the boy might have a difficult time with his blue-stocking daughter. But it had turned out that Dappling’s library had afforded her all she could ask in the way of books, and she had found her father-in-law’s conversation to be modestly learned and sometimes even witty. It more than compensated for the occasional whiff of the frontier she discerned in the atmosphere around her.

Sometimes there were guests. Men came from New York and Pittsburgh to talk about iron and steel, or from the capitol to talk politics. At dinner and afterwards until bedtime they talked their business or politics, with Sam utterly absorbed in the conversation and Dappling joining in with a certain detached amusement, while Olivia sat rigid with boredom, mechanically making the proper responses. But there were other visitors, people from Olivia’s former world who came for extended visits to rest and restore their failing energies in the mountain air. When there were houseguests in residence, dinners were leisurely affairs, deliberately protracted by Olivia; it was the time of the best conversation, and meals were the chief – almost the only – entertainment there in the country. There might be cards in the late evening, or Olivia would play Chopin or Schubert with passable skill. Sometimes they gathered around the piano and sang; often they sat on the lawn late into the night, the talk incessant under the stridulation of night insects until it was time for bed.

Sam was always glad of bedtime; indeed, he found himself looking forward to it almost from the time he rose in the morning. One of his amusements, when conversation about paintings or cotillions had bored him to the point of numbness, was to picture Olivia as she would be later in their bedroom; he liked to imagine the expressions on the faces around the table if they suddenly found themselves conversing not with the cool hostess who was explicating Darwin, but with the Olivia that only he had ever seen, who came into being after the bedroom door had closed. Both Sam and Olivia had been at first enormously surprised and then intensely grateful for the depth of her sexuality; but both were quite certain that it was somehow discreditable, and they were in agreement that it should be utterly secret. Their public manner towards each other was almost formal; they lived in the innocent belief that their passion was wholly concealed.

Dappling was much amused by their affectation of coolness, but it was a benign and complacent amusement. They were a happy couple, and their happiness was a cornerstone of Emily’s world. Whatever made Emily happy met with Dappling’s unqualified approval. It was his intent that her life was to be without sorrow, that her merriment was to continue all of her days. It was to this end that he directed the affairs of his mill, his estate, and his people, so that Emily could never know want, would always have responsible protectors, would always have her path smooth and the way open, no matter what happened to him, no matter what happened to Sam and Olivia. Large sums of money were so placed that she was forever assured of opulence, whatever the vagaries of the economy; banks in Pittsburgh and lawyers in New York were committed by pledge and self-interest to protect her as a jewel; young matrons in the best circles of Eastern Seaboard cities were already anticipating the day when they would sponsor her; and throughout Goster County hard men and their tough women, bound to Dappling by a fealty that was near-feudal, had come to understand that the welfare of this child was to be protected in any and all circumstances, by whatever means were necessary.

Dappling had done what he could, and he did not doubt that it was enough. In any case, he saw his safeguards only as an excess of caution. There was no reason why he should not live until Emily herself was a grandmother, and he proposed to guard her tenderly through all those years. But such speculation about the far future was confined to moments of active planning; in his heart, in his day-to-day thought, she was forever five years old, forever a golden child laughing among flowers in a long golden afternoon. And that would be the reality, in a way.