Time Out of Mind (87 page)

“
You have something on your mind, Chester?” Tilden
asked.

“
Yes. The only sizable one is Tilden's endowment for
that hospice of his.”

“
Get the six thousand there, if you can. The more Wax
is compromised, the better. But waste no time on this. Even
if you must beg or borrow the money, get into that safe
before this week is out. Do you understand me?”

Corbin.

Mrs. Charlotte Whitney Corbin. Huntington stared dis
believingly at the name.

He knew who she was. He'd known for almost a quarter century. He'd seen her with him at the service for Theodore
Roosevelt. She was that Chicago woman he was·forever traveling to visit. That she might receive some considera
tion, some remembrance, would not have surprised him.
But his heir? To almost everything? Cash accounts, real
estate, insurance policies, personal mementos ... every
thing. To Charlotte Corbin and to Jonathan T Corbin, who
appears to be her son, and who is named as executor of the
estate with absolute discretion over the affairs and the dis
position of Beckwith & Company. Huntington turned to a
number of codicils that had been added over a period of
years. Another Corbin. Whitney. And somebody named
Lucy Stone Turtle. Lesser bequests but still quite substantial. And here. Huntington Beckwith. Huntington Beckwith
is to receive an income of $45,000 per year for ten years,
whether or not he remains active in the affairs of the firm.
If Huntington Beckwith should challenge this will, that bequest is to be withdrawn from him and added to the en
dowment fund for Hastings House.

Tilden's will made no direct reference to Jonathan being his son. This omission was deliberate and out of sensitivity to Margaret's concern about Jonathan learning from strang
ers that he was an illegitimate child. But it did not take
Huntington long to begin to suspect the truth. Next in the
portfolio were photographs of the woman, some quite old
and worn, as if they'd been handled often, and several of
a man who had to be this Jonathan. He was the image of Tilden Beckwith. Tilden's bastard. Huntington stared long
and hard at that face, and as he did a part of him knew that
what he had long suspected was true. He, Huntington Beckwith, was not Tilden's son. It would explain much. It would explain why there was so little resemblance. Why they were
so little alike in all ways. Why the old man had had so
little regard for him all his life and why he was effectively
disinheriting him at the end of it.

Whose son was he, then? And what of these dates? Birth
dates. And what of the coincidence of his mother's death so soon after his birth? Let's see. That was March when
she died. March of 1888. And here is this Jonathan born in
December of the same year. So he must have been con
ceived almost immediately after Mother's death. Clearly, a
relationship existed between Tilden and Charlotte at the
time of his, Huntington’s birth. What happened to Mother?
Did she learn about that relationship and confront him? Did
she rush distraught into the night only to be killed by that
storm? A most convenient storm for Tilden, it seems. No.
More likely it was he who did the confronting—
about the
birth of a child who looked so little like him. And very
possibly, though it could never be proved, Tilden was the
cause of Mother's death. And for that he would be pun
ished. For that, and for all the cold looks, all the perfunc
tory greetings, all the distant schools, all the insults. Tilden
would be punished.

It was all there. Three affidavits. One by a man, another
by a woman named Hastings—Hastings?—who attested to hearing Ansel Carling boast that he had fathered Ella Beck
with's child. The third by Tilden himself, in his own hand.
It amounted to a diary of the events of 1888. He could not,
Tilden had realized, be this child's father. His travels to
London the year before had ruled out that possibility. The
human gestation period of nine months seemed to come as
a revelation to him sometime in March of 1888. He did
confront her. She ran from him. Toward this Carling per
son. The next paragraph was very nearly a confession of murder. The one after that confessed an assault upon this
Carling, in unnecessary but prideful detail, Huntington
thought, down at the old Hoffman House. Carling dead later
that same year ... Texas
...
his death possibly arranged by
Jay Gould “before I could get my own hands on him one
more time.” Then several clippings attached and what
seemed to be a handwritten biography, a hand not Tilden’s,
of Ansel Carling,,formerly Asa Koenig. A Jew? A former convict? A confidence man?

It was too much. He and his daughter, and young Tillie
as well, were being stripped of everything. There would be no money, no lineage, no position. A Jew! Jews are people
they tell jokes about and keep out of clubs. His own clubs.
They would have nothing. Only humiliation if this became
known.

Bigelow's report raised as many questions as it an
swered. It took him only a week to compile a basic biog
raphy on Charlotte Whitney Corbin, which worked
backward from Chicago to Greenwich to Wilkes-Barre. But
he could find no real evidence of her existence prior to the
train wreck that supposedly killed her husband. Bigelow
went to the New York Public Library,
which had
several
illustrated books on the subject of rail disasters. All of them
told about Mud Run. The author of the latest and most detailed book lived in New York City. Bigelow called on
him and offered him a hundred dollars if he could find anything in his source material about a Charlotte Whitney or a Charlotte Whitney Corbin. The author, an obsessive
little man whose apartment was littered with railroad fur
nishings and memorabilia, called back the next day. The
only Corbin, he said, was a fatality named Hiram who was new to town and certainly not married. There was no other
Corbin connected with that train wreck or even mentioned
in the Wilkes-Barre census. Yes, he was sure of it. He listed
all the sources he'd checked in the hope that Bigelow
would still pay him the hundred dollars.