The Americans

by John Jakes

  She shrugged. “No kindness about it. I stayed until he sold the boat. He promised me part of the money and I didn’t want to leave without it.”

  He blinked, uneasy. “That’s pretty cold-blooded, Mrs. Stavros.”

  “Cold-blooded? What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you liked Eben.”

  “Hah!” Her dark eyes glinted, without warmth, and Carter began to wish he hadn’t chased her. The face in the lantern light was as lovely as ever, and yet he was beginning to notice wrinkles in it, and the cratering of the pores in her skin. He supposed those flaws had always been there. But now he saw them—just as he saw other things that surprised and upset him.

  “If that’s how you feel, why did you stay with him at all?”

  “Because he earned a good income before he got hurt. I want to go home to Poros. I’ve wanted to go home ever since Stavros died. Eben and I made an arrangement whereby each week he gave me what I needed—money—and I gave him what he wanted. Just ten dollars more and I’ll have enough for passage to Greece. I feel sorry for Eben, but he wasn’t an attractive man. He was old and he stank of fish. So do you—but you’re young and good-looking.”

  Her words shocked and saddened him. Poor, lonely Eben had talked so proudly about her angelic disposition— assuming no one would ever discover he had willingly paid for her companionship, and that she had just as willingly sold it. A business transaction. Christ. Were all women as mercenary as she was? For the first time, he wondered.

  Languorously, she relaxed against the dirty brick wall, drawing her shoulders back and pushing her belly forward so that her skirt touched his trousers. She moved her hips and laid her left arm over his right shoulder, then crooked it around his neck and pulled his head closer to hers.

  “Aha, that teases you a little, doesn’t it? Feeling me excites you—”

  With her right hand she reached down and touched him. He wanted to tear the hand away and run.

  “I despise America, but I don’t despise American men. Not all of them, anyhow. Just the pious ones who pray on Sunday and try to put their hands up your dress the other six days of the week. I’ve met plenty of those. Tell them to stop and they call you a dirty foreigner—which is what their wives call you all of the time. But with ten more dollars—such a little bit—I can go home to the place I love. Would you give me ten dollars? For five dollars, I’ll take you to my room and let you love me any way you wish. Ten dollars—you can have me all night. I did business with old Eben. Surely I can do business with—”

  Carter flung off her arm. “Get away from me before I break your damn neck.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” she whispered. “What kind of self-righteous, cockless little wart are you? Maybe you’re more Greek than I. Maybe you like little boys—”

  “Whore!” he shouted, and shoved her so hard she fell. Lithe as a cat, she caught herself on hands and knees and glared from under a fall of dark, gleaming hair.

  Three longshoremen walked by, their box hooks hanging from their belts. One called, “What d’you think she’d be if not a whore, my lad? Ain’t any other kind of women walkin’ around here this time o’ night.”

  Helen Stavros scrambled to her feet, gave Carter a withering look and poured out profanity, English and Greek, so filthy and violent it was almost like a physical blow. Then she turned and strode away, haughty and injured.

  Bewildered, he watched her go. A huge, sick ache filled his middle. He’d thought she was a beautiful woman who loved poor Royce. But she wasn’t beautiful—she was a slut. She’d deceived him. There was, apparently, nothing to believe in and no one to trust, save yourself.

  Carter slouched on toward the Red Cod, the mood of profound disillusionment refusing to lift. He was by turns shocked and angry the rest of the night. When he flung Josie on her pallet in her cubicle upstairs at the Cod, she complained afterward that he had never treated her so roughly— as if he were revenging himself on her rather than loving her.

  CHAPTER X

  CAMPAIGN YEAR

  i

  BUSINESS PRESSURES FORCED GIDEON to neglect Carter and his problems during the next few months. Carter had managed to hang on to his menial job at the fish processing plant. And he’d repaid about a third of what he owed for the wagon. He still lived with the family, but they saw less and less of him; he worked nights and slept days—when he wasn’t off carousing. With increasing frequency, he was away from home several days at a time. Gideon decided to assign a man from Kent and Son to make occasional inquiries. He didn’t prettify this action with some high-sounding description that absolved him of guilt. In his thoughts he called it what it was—spying. But he justified the measure on the grounds that he might learn something with which to reassure Julia.

  His hope was a vain one. The information brought back to him was so disturbing, he didn’t dare pass it along to his wife. Gideon’s informant repeatedly said the young man was mixing with a bad crowd: tavern idlers, harlots, people prone to resolve trivial quarrels by violence. His favorite haunt was the notorious Red Cod.

  Something would have to be done to put the young man’s life back on a better course. But what? The answer continued to elude Gideon.

  The end of the year brought the prospect of a presidential election campaign and a new employee to the publishing house. In offices all around the country, typewriting machines were bringing a new neatness, speed, and efficiency to the preparation of letters, records, and memoranda. A Wisconsin inventor named Sholes had designed the prototype in 1867. After several modifications, it was being manufactured by Remington and Sons, and meeting wide acceptance.

  Of course it required an operator, who was called a typewriter. Many firms put men in the job until the men complained the work was demeaning and not sufficiently masculine. When Gideon expressed his interest in obtaining one of the machines, Julia urged him to hire a woman to run it. She said that because of the new machine, women were being taken into offices for the very first time. Julia’s suffragist group saw the Sholes typewriter and Sir Isaac Pitman’s shorthand system as weapons of economic liberation for the female sex.

  Gideon recognized the familiar signs of determination in Julia and bowed to them. After interviewing four obviously inexperienced women, he found one who favorably impressed him—a prim spinster named Helene Vail. Miss Vail was somewhere in her forties. She had lively hazel eyes and the prettiest contralto voice he’d ever heard. She was also monumentally ugly.

  Using his new office machine, Miss Vail demonstrated her skill. She was fast and accurate. She was equally good with dictation. They were soon discussing wages. Gideon mentioned a very high figure—eighty dollars per month. That was the amount he’d put into a preliminary yacht budget for both his captain-pilot and his engineer. He assumed Miss Vail would be as important to him as either of them.

  “Would eighty be satisfactory?” he asked.

  Miss Vail pursed her lips, the closest she was ever to come to smiling, he would discover.

  “Very satisfactory, sir. If each of us remains content with our arrangement in the months to come, you may be sure nothing will distract me from my duties, or induce me to leave for another post. My parents are gone, I have neither brothers nor sisters, and I have been in the world of commerce most of my adult life. I have no emotional attachments. At an early age, I was disappointed in love.”

  “I see.” Gideon suppressed a grin. “Are you always so candid, Miss Vail?”

  “Yes. It is the only way to accomplish things quickly and without misunderstanding.”

  She surveyed his desk. “As soon as I become familiar with my other duties, I will undertake the sorting and arranging of that material. This office is a disgrace. I’m sure you’ll work more happily and efficiently when I take charge of it.”

  Openmouthed, he recovered sufficiently to say, “I’m sure I will.”

  And so it proved.

  ii

  Gideon was a Republican, though not a fanatical
one. In less than two decades, the party’s foundation of crusading idealism had eroded. More and more, it was becoming the captive of private interests. He disliked many of its positions and practices, and wondered how much longer he could support its candidates in good conscience.

  Of course it was not only the Republicans with whom he found fault. There were plenty of trimmers among the Democrats, too. As a newspaper publisher—a professional malcontent—there were some days when he despised the whole damn population.

  He continued to be deeply concerned about the growing self-indulgence of the American people. Wealth was worshiped above all else. To many, admission to Society had become more important than eventual admission to Heaven. It seemed to him that the desire for personal comfort, the pursuit of prestige and the fulfillment of selfish ambition had replaced an earlier ideal of earning one’s livelihood in some occupation which bettered the lot of mankind. As 1883 closed, he reluctantly concluded that the country’s ruling passion was greed.

  Greed in the form of the patronage issue had all but split the Republican Party in 1880, when Senator Conkling’s so-called Stalwart wing had fought with the reform-minded Half-breed faction. The Half-breeds had succeeded in nominating and electing Garfield. The president’s assassin had publicly identified himself as a Stalwart. That had dimmed the movement’s star forever.

  The split in the Republican ranks was still very much in evidence, however. Early in 1884, Gideon began to hear rumors that at the convention the Republicans might finally turn to James Blaine. Twice before, Blaine had been denied the presidential nomination because of impropriety.

  Years ago, Blaine had been dubbed the Plumed Knight. But now the plume was dirty and broken. After the war, Blaine had been caught profiteering. He’d peddled his influence and his Congressional vote, and taken payment in cash, stocks and bonds. A bookkeeper named Mulligan had gotten hold of evidence in the form of a packet of letters. Blaine was able to recapture the letters, which he took to the floor of the House in a bold move to vindicate himself. After he’d read some of the letters aloud for the record, his fellow Congressmen had cheered and shouted for his vindication. But there was no doubt that he was guilty. And so, in ’76 and again in ’80, the Republicans had denied his bid for the nomination.

  Now one faction of the party was talking him up again. Another group, which included men such as Carl Schurz and Charles Francis Adams, Junior, was saying Blaine could never win—especially if the Democrats nominated the vigorous reform governor of New York, Stephen Grover Cleveland.

  Among some Republicans, sentiment for and against Blaine was even stronger than Gideon had suspected. He found this out during one of his regular visits to New York City during the winter. At a party function, he met numerous outspoken foes of the candidacy. But he met some fierce partisans, too, and got into a shouting match with one of them—a paunchy and garrulous real estate millionaire named Thurman Pennel.

  Pennel maintained that Blaine had merely done what dozens of other Congressmen of both parties had done before and since. The Plumed Knight’s only crime had been to get caught, Pennel declared. Gideon considered that specious excuse the mark of a confused mind. He told Pennel he didn’t believe in pardoning a murderer merely because an unknown number of other people in the world had committed the same crime and gotten away with it.

  From that point, their words grew hotter. He and Pennel almost exchanged blows before others dragged them apart and pushed Pennel out of the room with a demand that he sober up. For a few minutes, Gideon regretted what he’d done; it was the McAllister Incident all over again. Then he shrugged off the regret. He believed every word he’d said, and it didn’t matter that some bloated plutocrat disliked him. It was too late for Gideon Kent to polish his reputation. Besides, a ruined reputation was often the price of choosing to tell the truth.

  iii

  Sometimes, Carter thought, one more day at the processing plant would make him lose his sanity. Yet each night he forced himself to walk through the old, warped door at the employees’ entrance, and hack and chop with the serrated knife until the sun came up again.

  He often played mental games to help pass the time. A fish which he decapitated was Eisler, or Phipps, or the Portugee who had ruined Eben Royce’s life. At other times, he considered ways to escape the trap in which he found himself. He couldn’t think of any that were realistic. The wagon was about two-thirds paid for, and he convinced himself that he didn’t really have to think about his situation until the debt was completely erased. It was a convenient means of postponing the admission that he didn’t know what the devil he was going to do with his life.

  He saw Royce occasionally—always from a distance. After that first time, he never approached him again. The men who frequented the taverns, most of them whole of body and mind, spoke sadly, even uneasily of the pathetic man who hobbled around the docks on his padded crutch. As for Helen Stavros, she was gone—back to Greece, Carter presumed. Sometimes he thought of taking a horsecar to Cambridge to see Willie Hearst, but he was too ashamed.

  The monotonous routine at the foot of the delivery chute did drive one thought deeper and deeper into his being. Somehow, somehow, he would find a way to be the one who gave the orders, instead of just another one of the millions who took them. He clung to that certainty, and by means of it, his sanity.

  He heard no further word of Ortega. The man might have stepped into a crevice in the earth and fallen to China. Then, after a particularly lively four-day stretch of roistering, he came to work one bitter winter night nursing a ferocious headache and a queasy stomach and there, folded on the locker shelf, he found another note.

  Dont think he wil forget

  —Frend of O.

  That did it. Carter could no longer control the spasms in his gut. He managed to lurch outside before he threw up what little his stomach contained. He closed his eyes, gulping the piercing winter air that had dried his lips and cracked them open. He kept seeing Ortega’s vicious eyes, and the fishhook scar. He wished to God the Portugee would come back from wherever he was hiding, so they could get it over with and he could live in peace again, not forced to study every shadow and analyze every sound when he roamed the docks by night.

  iv

  The Republican group that expressed aversion to Blaine included one New York State assemblyman of whom Gideon had been hearing good things lately—especially in his own newspaper. Theo Payne was a confirmed cynic, yet he’d been lavish in his praise of this particular assemblyman, whom his colleagues in Albany had dubbed the Young Reformer. The name was applied admiringly or sarcastically, depending on party affiliation or the amount of graft being taken by the speaker.

  There was no doubt the young man had made quite a mark during two terms in the state capital. Payne claimed he’d done well because he was rich, and therefore incorruptible. Gideon was anxious to meet him, and when he did, found him to possess an interesting and complex personality.

  Of average height, the young man had blond hair parted in the middle, and English side whiskers. He wore his eyeglasses on a black silk cord. He was ruggedly built, yet affected a languid drawl. Perhaps he thought an aristocrat was supposed to talk that way, Gideon reflected. But his voice—quite high-pitched—was already disconcerting enough.

  At twenty-six, he had already written his first book, a study of naval operations in the War of 1812. Gideon quickly realized he was intelligent, but a bit priggish, too. Still, the young man didn’t equivocate as so many politicians did.

  “I am a Republican through and through, Mr. Kent. Through and through! I shall support the party’s candidate no matter who it turns out to be. But I cannot give any credence to those who say it must and will be Blaine. He’s a tainted man. And contrary to what some drunken scoundrels like that Thurman Pennel claim, the Mulligan letters have not been forgotten. I shall expend every effort to block Mr. Blaine’s nomination.”

  “May we quote you on that in the Union?” Gideon asked, reaching for the
pad and pencil he always kept in a pocket.

  “By godfrey, indeed you may. You may also say this. Mr. Blaine is unacceptable because he is too ultimately connected with the class represented by Mr. Gould—which is, in my opinion, the most dangerous of all classes. Far more dangerous than the so-called radicals—”

  Bright, unblinking eyes met Gideon’s through heavy lenses. “I refer, sir, to the wealthy criminal class.” Right after the war, Gideon had had a run-in with Mr. Jay Gould, the notorious financier. So the remarks he’d just heard helped him decide that he liked young Mr. Theodore Roosevelt of the West Fifty-seventh Street Roosevelts, Harvard, and New York’s Twenty-first Congressional District. The two men corresponded during what turned out to be a tragic winter for Roosevelt, and they promised to meet again at the Republican convention.

  v

  The Republicans convened in Chicago on the third of June. Gideon took a train from Boston, entering the convention city for the first time in seven years. He was astonished at how completely the downtown area had been rebuilt. Hardly a trace of the effects of the fire of 1871 remained.

  He had been caught in the midst of that fire, and there were many reasons why he could never forget it. Making love to Julia on the night the fire broke out was perhaps the most important.

  Chicago reminded him of Tom Courtleigh, too—Courtleigh who for years had tried to destroy him. It reminded him of his youngest brother, Jeremiah, whom everyone had thought lost in the war. Jeremiah had turned up in Chicago, as one of Courtleigh’s bodyguards. He’d sacrificed himself in Courtleigh’s office to save Gideon from being killed.

  This summer, Chicago produced another unexpected link with the past. Gazing up from the press area of the convention floor, Gideon thought he recognized a face in the gallery. He climbed the gallery stairs and, sure enough, he was right. There sat Michael Boyle.