The Americans

by John Jakes

  “An acquaintance mailed it from Johnstown—along with a letter of protest. Theodore didn’t unwrap the package until our committee was in session. The minute he saw this charming item, he went off like a mortar. He demanded that the jeweler who designed and sold it be arrested and sent to jail. On what grounds, he didn’t quite make clear. He shouted that he’d take the case to Washington if we refused to become involved.”

  “Did the committee become involved?”

  “No. We persuaded him that there’s no way on God’s earth to legislate greed out of existence. In his calmer moments, Theodore knows that.”

  Julia picked up the spoon. “By the way, you never told me whether Theodore made a decision about Washington. Is he going to take the post with the Harrison administration?”

  Gideon nodded. “The salary’s a munificent thirty-five hundred dollars a year. But he really feels he can do something worthwhile as a civil service commissioner. I hope he’s right. God knows the government needs a comprehensive merit system. Right now, a congressman can get his favorite nephew a good job even if the boy’s the village idiot.”

  He noticed Julia moving her thumb back and forth over the raised designs on the spoon. He frowned.

  “Logic aside, I agree with Theodore about that thing. The man who’s peddling them should be flogged.”

  “I’m not sure I recognize everything depicted on it. Do you?”

  She handed the spoon to him. He held it up, pointed to the handle.

  “That’s the dam that gave way.”

  His finger slid down the shaft. “This is supposed to be the Conemaugh River coming down in full flood upon”— he touched the bottom of the bowl of the spoon—“the stone bridge.” Color in his cheeks, he flung the spoon back on the table. It made a loud clacking, and stirred motes in a sunbeam. The two Kents started at an unexpected voice.

  “Please get that thing out of here.”

  Gideon turned to see Eleanor standing at the bedroom door. She wore widow’s weeds, unadorned by even a trace of white. That and the deep shadow surrounding her made it seem as if her pale hands and face floated in darkness.

  With a tone of apology, Gideon began, “I had no idea you’d returned from your shopping—”

  She didn’t let him finish: “I shouldn’t have gone. The crowds were frightful. I don’t think I’ll try again. I was resting with the door open when I heard you and Julia talking. There are enough reminders of Leo’s death as it is, Papa. Get rid of that filthy thing!”

  Her skirt rustled as she glided out of sight.

  With a stricken look, he slipped the spoon in his pocket. “I really thought she was still out. Otherwise I’d never have shown you the infernal thing.”

  “I know, darling.” Julia gave his forearm a gentle pat. “I know that. It’s a small mistake. You mustn’t feel so guilty.”

  Gideon’s blue eye fixed on the patch of darkness where his daughter had disappeared. He stood up suddenly, struck a match and held it to his cigar. Wreathed in blue smoke, he started to pace.

  “She’s a very strong girl, Julia. But this unfeeling manner she’s adopted since she came home upsets me. The only time she displays an iota of emotion is when she tells me how vile this country is. She’s developed an unreasonable hatred of America—”

  “Not so unreasonable,” Julia countered. “Think of the way immigrants are treated. Think of what the Negroes’ lot has been for years. Eleanor’s feelings are completely understandable when you recall what she went through as Leo’s wife. Large and small humiliations. An attack on his father. And finally his death. You must see her side of it.”

  “I do! But we aren’t talking about some sort of— intellectual posture. We’re talking about her response to the death of her husband. She ought to show some sorrow. Weep! She did the night I found her in Johnstown, but she’s held back ever since.”

  “Well, she’s always been a very private sort of person. She’s never told us what happened to her in ’77, for instance, and we’ve agreed that she probably never will. Perhaps Leo’s death was the same kind of shock. Perhaps it hurts too much for her to mourn him in a conventional way.”

  “She should let it hurt, so she’ll recover. Bottling everything inside is just no good.”

  “I’m sure she’s acting.”

  “What?”

  “Acting,” Julia repeated with a small shrug. “Playing a role. It may be that she’s been offended by all the howling and breast-beating that sometimes accompanies the death of a loved one. I suspect she’s picked another role. A more restrained one. Your daughter’s very accomplished at playing any role she chooses for herself—”

  Role. That was it. Julia had said it without understanding it. Days ago, he should have realized what Eleanor was doing. It had nothing to do with a dislike of the hysteria that often followed funerals. It was something she’d done before—something so frightening in its implications that his mind must have evaded an acknowledgment of it.

  “Darling, what’s wrong?” Julia said, noting his stricken look.

  “I know why she hides her feelings.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I say I know why she hides her feelings! It just came to me. You used the word role a moment ago. Don’t you see what role Eleanor’s playing? No, I suppose I shouldn’t expect that. You never knew her.”

  Confused, Julia shook her head. “Knew Eleanor—?”

  “Margaret. Eleanor’s acting like her mother.”

  “Oh, dear God, Gideon—what are you saying?”

  His expression was anguished. “I’ve caught glimpses of it before. In the last few years before Margaret died, she was rigid, secretive, obsessed with herself. Eleanor’s playing the part to perfection, whether she realizes it or not. It’s to be expected that she’d somewhat resemble her mother. I suppose most daughters do. But Leo’s death—” He could barely utter the rest. “Somehow, it’s pushing her beyond the bounds of a normal family resemblance. Eleanor’s responding to her loss just the way Margaret responded to her problems. By shutting out the world as completely as she could. To a certain extent, Eleanor did that when Leo was alive. Now that he’s gone, she’s still doing it—but now it’s her entire existence.”

  Silence. Julia pondered, looking as upset as her husband. Finally she said, “What a terrifying thought. I fear you may be right. It explains so many things. She’s never impolite when I speak to her. But neither is she remotely interested in what I have to say—or in sharing her thoughts with me.”

  “Nor with me—except when she reviles the whole damn country for what one man did.” He reached out to squeeze his wife’s hand. “You mustn’t take her behavior as any kind of personal insult—”

  “Oh, I don’t. But I’m desperately worried about her.”

  “With good reason.” He pointed to a six-inch stack of letters and telegrams on a side table. “No wonder she hasn’t replied to any of those messages of sympathy from her colleagues—or to the offers of work. She’s read a few, but she hasn’t answered a single one. I asked her.”

  As if trying to disprove Gideon’s frightening thesis, Julia countered, “Well—conventionally speaking, she’s supposed to mourn for a year.”

  “Julia! When have actresses—or the Kents—ever worried about convention? She ought to go back to work the moment she’s able. It would help her survive her grief. But she’s no longer interested in the theater. She isn’t interested in anything.”

  And neither was her mother after she began her descent to madness.

  Husband and wife were silent then. Another punishing thought struck Gideon: Lost is truly the word for this whole family now.

  The word had come to mind that night six years ago when he’d wandered down to the Boston piers, speculating about the family’s future. Much had changed since then. But nothing had improved. If anything, the situation was far worse.

  Carter was off at the other end of the continent and might never amount to anything. Will was pursuing his amb
ition to be a Society doctor, and was completely dominated by a girl of questionable reputation. Eleanor hated and scoffed at everything the Kents stood for—and not long ago he’d regarded her as the family’s only potential leader.

  What a misguided fool he’d been. Not only was she lost to the family—she might be lost to life itself. He recalled another fact about Margaret’s descent to madness. Once begun, it had been unstoppable.

  He and Julia stared hopelessly at one another in the blue-tinted sunshine. Soon she rose, murmuring, “I want to see if she’s all right.”

  She walked to Eleanor’s door, tapped softly, received no answer and reached for the knob. Even before she spoke, Gideon knew what she would say. “It’s locked.”

  With a sad shake of her head, she disappeared into her own room. While the disturbed cigar smoke slowly came to rest again, Gideon at last relaxed his face and let his discomfort show.

  He fought for breath as a spike of pain in the center of his chest held him in his chair. It was the worst pain he’d ever experienced. He knew with certainty that his days were fast running out.

  Book Five

  THE MARBLE COTTAGE

  CHAPTER I

  SUMMER OF ’89

  i

  FOR WILL, IT WAS a tense and troubled summer.

  He was twenty that year. A difficult age, Julia teasingly remarked to him once. Too young to be fully launched in life, and too old to be at home under the scrutiny of a strong-willed father.

  Will’s response was a vigorous nod. Relations between Gideon and his son were polite, but that was all. Each felt angry with the other, and suppressed it. As the days passed, it became more and more likely that some insignificant event would shatter the artificial calm and let that anger erupt with disastrous consequences. Some days Will dreaded it; at other times, he couldn’t wait for it to happen. Often he didn’t know how the hell he felt.

  He had volunteered as a ward orderly at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He preferred working and learning to idling around Beacon Street while he waited for the end of July. At that time he planned to spend eight or ten days with the Pennels at their new summer home in Newport. Gideon knew about the trip, of course. It was one of the reasons he was testy with his son.

  Will was eager to visit Newport, but much less enthusiastic about the trip he was to take immediately afterward. From Rhode Island he planned to go straight to New York, to fulfill the promise made that morning at the Statue of Liberty.

  Drew was part of the reason Will felt so unsettled. For three years, the two friends had studied, worried, argued, and joked together. Now Drew had finished his course and graduated. Doctor of Medicine, 1889. He was already at work in Manhattan’s notorious Sixth Ward, caring for some of the patients of the doctor whose practice he shared. His brief letters reminded Will in cheerful but pointed fashion that he was counting on his friend’s visit.

  Will loathed the idea of going into the slums, but he’d made a promise, and he’d honor it. He told no one, though—not his parents, and certainly not Laura.

  Laura. He thought of her often. At night he lay in the humid darkness and imagined how she would look stripped of all those layers of silk and cotton and steel boning that produced the Lillian Russell figure—tiny waist, swelling bosom—that young ladies wanted so badly. The waking dreams were painful for Will. He was strong and in good health, and he hadn’t been with a woman since his first and only visit to Madam Melba’s.

  One thing did please him, though. Carter was happy for a change. He was in San Francisco, working for a politician named Buckley.

  “My God, I’ve read about that rascal,” Gideon had exclaimed when he first read the news in a letter. “They say he makes Boss Croker and the rest of the Tammany thieves look like heavenly cherubs by comparison. Where the hell is this family going?”

  Carter seemed to have found his niche. He ran errands and drafted letters for Buckley, who exercised phenomenal power in the Bay Area. He said he was enjoying the life, learning a lot, and making important connections that would favorably influence his future.

  Will hoped all of that was true. Whether it was or not, he was glad to read cheerful letters from Carter at long last.

  Will was working hard to fulfill his promise to his stepbrother. In another year, he’d be ready to establish a practice like that of the very successful Dr. Vlandingham— whether his father liked it or not. By doing that, it was also conceivable that he could carry the family one rung higher on a ladder Gideon and Julia would be forever unable to climb. In fact he might be able to lift the Kents to the very highest level of American Society—a goal not entirely unworthy of a family which prided itself on achievement, he frequently reminded himself.

  And yet, thoughts of Drew’s situation sometimes soured the taste of Will’s ambition, generated doubt, and drove the promise to Carter from his mind.

  Gideon frequently made unflattering comments about the Pennels. And in a household in which daily events were the grist for the family business, there was seldom a meal without some talk of politics. Those discussions provided additional opportunities for Will and his father to quarrel.

  A storm of social protest was rising in the West and South that year. Farmers in both regions felt they were being exploited by the railroads, whose owners still formed secret combinations to fix freight rates, and by bankers who did the same for interest rates. High interest made it almost impossible for farmers to borrow for expansion, let alone survive one or more seasons of drought.

  Even the government had become the farmer’s enemy. Most politicians were in the pockets of the capitalist manufacturers—or so the farmers said. There was certainly some evidence to support the claim. A high tariff imposed by Congress reduced the flow of imported goods. Thus farm families could only buy domestically made products—but the prices had been set so high, the farmers couldn’t afford them.

  Finally, the farmers wanted an increase in the money supply. They proposed to bring this about by removing the U.S. from an exclusive gold standard and supplementing paper money that was backed by gold with unlimited coinage of silver.

  Organizations were formed to fight for farmers’ rights and redress their grievances. Successors to the Grange of a decade earlier, the new organizations—the Southern and Northwestern Alliances—were considerably more militant. Gideon called them evangelists of an agrarian revolt, and did so with the enthusiasm of a man anticipating a championship prizefight.

  Will often found himself speaking against the Alliances, since that was the position taken by Laura’s father. Thurman Pennel damned the members of the two Alliances as illiterate immigrants and Southern traitors who had banded together to promote anarchy. Will repeated that assertion. But he had no evidence to support it. Gideon easily demolished his arguments with facts and sarcasm.

  The farmers were allied with the powerful Knights of Labor, and loomed as a formidable political force in the decade ahead. Will parroted Pennel’s view that the Republican Party had nothing to worry about. Its control of all branches of the federal government created a barricade no wild-eyed reformer could ever breach. Gideon countered with the argument that the party was essentially powerless, because its majority in the House of Representatives was so slim. The Democrats had the votes to block almost any legislation. The result would not be a pro-Democratic Congress, of course, but one which did nothing.

  And yet that summer, the powerful Republican Speaker of the House, rotund Tom Reed of Maine—Czar Reed, some called him—was already predicting that the Fifty-first Congress scheduled to convene in December would be the first in history to spend a billion dollars. Only fitting, Reed declared. America’s wealth had reached a phenomenal level. A billion-dollar country deserved a billion-dollar Congress.

  Meantime, huge sums had been raised for relief in Johnstown. The city was setting up its rebuilding program and trying to erase the horror of the flood from collective memory. That horror lingered like a ghost in the house on Beacon Street; Wil
l felt its eerie presence whenever he spent time with his sister.

  Eleanor kept to herself a good deal, and continued to wear black to honor Leo’s memory. Occasionally she denounced the country in fiery, almost incoherent language— performances Gideon endured in red-faced silence—but those outbursts were her only displays of emotion. She seldom mentioned her husband’s name.

  Yet in Eleanor’s dark eyes, Will thought he glimpsed a pain, a memory—an unmentionable something—she was constantly fighting to suppress. He asked her about it one Sunday afternoon when he took her for a walk on the Common.

  She assured him there was nothing specific troubling her, only the general exhaustion and shock that were the legacies of Johnstown. Her replies were uncharacteristically sharp, and Will wasn’t satisfied she was telling the truth. But there was no way to prove otherwise, and he let the matter rest.

  One thing that was emerging plainly was that Eleanor had no interest in returning to the theater. That became certain soon after the day a large package arrived for her. When Julia asked about the package at dinner, Eleanor said it contained a script sent by a producer, Daniel Frohman’s younger brother, Charles. He wanted her to read it. She said no more.

  After dinner, Will went to her room in the hope of getting her to talk about the script. He knocked but Eleanor didn’t open the door. She asked him to come back another time because she was sleepy.

  She sounded wide-awake.

  The next day Will found the script on the floor beside a wicker chair in the solarium. Gideon had built the solarium a few years earlier, at the third-story front. It provided a magnificent view of the State House dome, the rooftops of Boston, and the leafy Common just across Beacon Street.

  Will sat down and opened the cover of the script; he found a note tucked inside. With only a slight feeling of guilt he unfolded the note. Charles Frohman apologized for intruding on Eleanor’s grief, but did so because he considered the accompanying script superior in every respect. He hoped she would read it, and think about taking a role when he produced the play in September. He was sure it would be a huge success.