When she allowed herself to dwell on the situation, she despised herself for her cowardice. Katherine’s recent letters had been spiritless; exhausted chronicles of her daily routine containing few details that she had not already reported. Although she was too much like her mother to express her defeat in so many words, it was clear that her resiliency was gone and that she was tending to the minutiae of her life in a trance. Once, a carriage in which Edith had been riding had been stopped behind a police van and forced to wait while a band of ragged men in scrubby beards and handcuffs were driven by policemen armed with clubs up the steps of the county jail. It was an election year, and ninety days of incarceration and hard labor awaited them for the crime of vagrancy. Edith remembered the emptiness of the eyes in the gaunt faces, and the feeling that she could see clear through to the backs of their skulls. They were ambulatory dead men, nothing more. She saw newspapers rarely, but she had read in one of a tramp pursued by policemen who had thrown himself beneath the wheels of a freight train rumbling along the Michigan Central tracks. The reporter was incredulous, unable to understand why a man would choose death over a short sentence. And she remembered those empty eyes, and knew what the reporter did not, that freedom took more than one form. She wondered what Katherine’s eyes looked like as she went about the unchanging details of her confinement.
On this Saturday, however, as she pinned in place an orchid-colored hat that matched the yoke of her linen dress, Edith looked forward to an hour during which she could put aside her concerns about her daughter. She had an appointment to take tea with her favorite son.
She was the only Crownover who continued to observe the ritual of afternoon tea. Nine years earlier, when the prospect of a commission to build an opera coach for the Prince of Wales appeared certain, Abner had decided to adopt the practice. He employed the services of an impoverished English baronet then living with distant relatives in Ann Arbor to instruct the family in the protocol. Edith in particular had taken to the translucent cups and saucers and round-bottomed spoons and buttery scones. Long after His Royal Highness had bowed to the pressure of an indignant British press and a stern home secretary and selected a London carriage maker to fill his order, 4:00 P.M. still found Mrs. Crownover seated in her parlor or her favorite outside venue, the tearoom at the Wayne Hotel, while Abner and his sons reverted to their previous afternoon routines. It was one more thing to fill her day, and although she would have been scandalized at the suggestion, she took a certain quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that her loyalty to the custom irritated Abner. But he had spent far too much money on the baronet’s lessons to object out loud. She would never have admitted even to herself that upsetting her husband with impunity was one of the few pleasures that remained to her in life. In all innocence of this self-awareness, but with a pang of guilty joy that she convinced herself came from the anticipation of visiting with her son, she tugged on her gloves, hesitated over the collection of parasols in the wicker stand in the corner of her dressing room, then decided against taking one and descended the stairs to the foyer. There her driver waited to escort her outside to the two-seater she had ordered, an open buggy that struck her as less stuffily imperial than the closed brougham preferred by Abner.
Her upbringing in the genteel pastel society of Rhode Island had ingrained in her a distaste for ostentation. This was an unfortunate prejudice to carry into the Midwest, whose self-made millionaires emulated their New York models. These Gothamites had in turn borrowed their minareted and gingerbread-laden architecture from the Italian villas and castles on the Rhine they had seen on tours abroad. She thought the turrets and gimcracks of the Jefferson Avenue house vulgar. When she could not escape an invitation to the salons of her husband’s colleagues, she smiled to herself at the spectacle of so many bricklayers’ daughters flaunting their diamonds on the arms of escorts in immaculate shirtboards with old mortar-dust ground into their knuckles. These were observations she could share with no one, even if she could find someone who would understand them. Along with a love of coarse display, the circles in which she and Abner traveled shared an austere and obvious absence of irony.
Her antipathy extended to the greater Wayne Hotel. The cheap gloss of its marble floors, the depth of its carpets like sphagnum moss, and the Wagnerian massiveness of its fireplaces combined to create the sort of place where stove makers in derbies preferred to smoke cigars and talk about their trade. For this the hotel offered three bars, five restaurants, and a basement tonsorial parlor with ten chairs and all the major out-of-town newspapers. Every spring at the Shipmaster’s Ball these tightly wound entrepreneurs climbed into tailcoats and trotted out their marriagable daughters for the admiration of young men with whose fathers they drank, dined, and barbered the rest of the year. None of these were things that could not be found in the East, of course. The difference out here, where less than a hundred years ago the city had maintained a stockade to keep out feathered savages, was the inflated, pasteboard quality of the pretense. The men’s evening dress and women’s ball gowns appeared to be wearing the wearers, like costumes in an amateur theatrical; patent learners pinched toes that would be more comfortable in brogans, corsets creaked like hawsers, all in the name of borrowed propriety. The dog aped the master, and the cat the dog, on down to the goldfish swimming around its bowl wearing a miniature hat. It was all so much burlesque.
One of the reasons she looked forward to time spent with her second son was the conjecture that she could confide in him her feelings about the entire shabby exhibition. She did not share the general conviction that Harlan was backward. True, he was silent when others were vocal, and the male world was an argumentative one in which nonparticipation was interpreted as lack of an intelligent opinion. Nevertheless she had thought she detected, whenever the conversation had grown particularly complacent on the subject of this competitor’s shortcomings or that politico’s approachability, a sparkle in Harlan’s eye. It was suspiciously similar to the one she saw in her own when something struck her as wickedly amusing while she was looking in a mirror. In every other aspect the eye was so much that of his father. But the thought that there was something so un-Abner-like behind it encouraged her to believe that her own sense of the absurd would not depart the family entirely when she was no more. It made her feel less alone.
She yearned to communicate to Harlan that he himself was not marooned, that here was the connection he could find nowhere else in the Crownover household. She had not as yet, nor did she think she ever would without some sign that the information would be welcome. There was a seriousness about Harlan, not to be confused with his father’s sobriety or the pomposity of his younger brother, that kept her from committing what might be an embarrassing error. It made her question the evidence of her own eyes, and wonder if the glitter she thought she had seen was just an empty reflection from a window. She knew this was not so, yet she feared the consequences of being wrong. The discovery that he was no different from any other Crownover would be too devastating to withstand. Better not to know, and to nurture the unrealized hope.
Despite its posturing, the Wayne was very much a part of the new century, for which she was grateful. Her husband unequivocally was not, and the fact that the hotel’s proprietor, Jim Hayes, had had the effrontery to host an automobile show there the previous year was another log on the fire of Abner’s annoyance that his wife should take tea there. Edith had not, of course, attended the show. The prospect of bumping up against a roomful of freshly scrubbed machinists drinking champagne and throwing open the bonnets of their contraptions to point out this or that greasy feature had not appealed to her. Noisy, odiferous machines that frightened horses and children and belched great choking blue clouds into the open air with sharp reports like gunfire repelled her, but she refused to fulminate against them. What was the point? One could not reverse time and uninvent something that should not have been invented. To protest would make as much sense as a woman complaining about politics, just as if she had the
vote.
In any case, she understood that Harlan had some interest in motorcars. If it was a subject that could bridge the gap that separated mother and son, then the Wayne seemed an amiable choice.
She thoroughly approved of the tearoom. It was her personal fancy that the room had been added as an afterthought and decorated by an outsider. Its proportions were anything but grand. Hayes, it seemed, had balked at wasting his overwrought chandeliers and imitation medieval tapestries upon a space so unassuming. The person left in charge had papered it with tea roses on a black background, installed Tiffany fixtures, and stood flickering candles in rose-colored glass bowls on the tables. The stiff white linens and delicate stemware discouraged the bray and clatter that filled the other dining rooms. Even the waiters whispered, and moved about as silently as monks. To pass through those French doors was to leave behind the enervating racket of the Industrial Revolution and enter a place where quiet and repose were something altogether deeper than just an interval between steam whistles. It seemed to her that the very air was lighter and easier to breathe.
She was shown to a small corner table by a bald waiter with immaculate white side-whiskers like the late Mr. Gladstone, who held her chair and bowed when he took his leave. She was aware of the attention her arrival had drawn from the other diners; she did not acknowledge it. The celebrity of her union with the richest man in town left her cold. Back home, society cared little how much a woman’s circumstances were reduced provided she belonged to an old family. In Detroit, she could have had a long past as a harlot, with a murderer for a father, without raising so much as a Japanese fan as long as she was the wife of Crownover Coaches.
When the bald waiter returned with her favorite Indian blend she informed him that she was meeting someone and would order her meal when he arrived. She sipped from the paper-thin cup, found the contents too hot, and replaced it in its saucer to cool while she listened to the muffled sounds of the Wayne. Silver tinkled, male and female voices murmured in hushed conversation, a rather insipid violin rendition of “Lorna Doone” drifted out of the morning-glory horn belonging to an unseen phonograph. Beneath it all, steel skate wheels rolled over the varnished boards of the rink in the Pavilion with a shuddering rumble like thunder. The windows were open on the side facing the river; the smell of sun on water reminded her of Newport. She felt a flash of homesickness. The sensation was recent, and still quite novel. After thirty years in Detroit she had thought it had died with her mother.
Harlan arrived ten minutes late, bowing over Edith’s hand and spouting apologies and explanations; something about inspecting an empty factory building on Mack Avenue, with Henry Ford involved somehow. (This was a name one could not escape of late.) Harlan could be excitable, and at such times she could scarcely follow his rapid speech. He was wearing his best summer worsted, but it needed pressing, and his broad features, so much like the Hamptons’ except for the disconcerting directness of the Crownover stare, looked a bit pinched.
She asked him, when he was seated, if he was getting enough sleep.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, as Mr. Ford says. You look wonderful. How is your back?” He snapped the folds out of his napkin and laid it in his lap.
“It isn’t bothering me today.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She shook her head in argument, but smiled at his perception. She was, in fact, in considerable pain; but as that was almost always the case she saw no reason to mention it. She had an aunt, currently in her nineties, who had been dying of something particularly painful and equally unidentifiable for twenty years, and who never ignored an opportunity to apprise everyone she met of the details of her misery. Edith was determined not to follow her tiresome example.
“Are you eating regularly?” she asked. “You look as if you’ve lost weight. I’m afraid the North Atlantic salmon is the heartiest thing on the menu here. I can have our waiter bring a steak from one of the other restaurants.”
He held up both palms in an attitude of self-defense. “I ate an enormous meal at Dolph’s before meeting Mr. Ford. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t feed me. I don’t think the man’s had honest food since he left the farm. If you wish to worry about someone, you should start with him. I think he lives on engine exhaust.”
“I’m your mother, not his. You needn’t snap.”
He sank a little in his seat.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m on edge. Father and I quarreled last week.”
“I thought that was what happened. He complained about his stomach for days. I suppose it was about automobiles.”
“He has no vision.”
The waiter materialized. Edith ordered chilled cucumber soup and the tiny crabmeat sandwiches she loved. Harlan asked for black coffee. His mother waited until they were alone again before she spoke.
“You would not have lived the life you have if it weren’t for your father’s vision. He saved the company.”
“I’ve heard that story all my life. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if Father had a little more of Grandfather’s idealism. I happen to think it’s a heroic thing to put one’s own welfare on the line for what he believes. He opposed slavery, for God’s sake.” His mother winced at the blasphemy, and he was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. The Dodge brothers were at Mack. Their rough manners are contagious.”
“I’ve heard they’re hooligans. You’re too much the gentleman for this automobile crowd, Harlan. I’m afraid you’ll be hurt.”
He smiled. It was his mother’s smile, and it drained the sting from his condescension. “I’m twenty, Mother. I’ll look to my own scrapes and bruises.”
“I know that. But you’re still my son. It’s an old lady’s privilege to dither about.”
He patted her hand.
“You don’t look a day past thirty, and you know it. Don’t play games with me. I’m not Ab.”
She knew he was not merely flattering her. At forty-seven, Edith was without wrinkles or blemishes, and no gray showed among the red-gold, rather fine strands of her hair. She had the hooded and slightly protuberant eyes of a duchess in a Renaissance painting. Her face was heart-shaped, with a patrician nose and a mouth that was disproportionately small, which to her mind made it her weakest feature. Local legend said she had turned down an offer to use her likeness in a magazine advertisement for Pearl Drop soap. There was no truth in it, but Edith was sufficiently inspired by any story that sowed envy among the hens who kept it alive not to stir herself to deny it.
She sighed a little at Harlan’s mention of her oldest son. “Young Abner fusses over me so. He makes no distinction between me and those pink-powder saints you see on the covers of song sheets.”
“Or in the pictures in your morning room. You can hardly blame him for drawing the conclusion.”
His smile this time, dry and tight-lipped, did not come from either side of the family. It was entirely his own, and it was vaguely troubling. She feared that he was becoming a cynic. Her only experience of that type of person was a scruffy young man in a shabby suit who had appeared in the lobby of the opera house during the intermission in A Lady of Quality, talking loudly about Marx and Engels and spattering the gowns and dinner jackets of his listeners with champagne from his glass when he gestured. Asked by the manager to leave, he had departed with a vile oath. Edith asked her son tentatively if he was a Socialist.
He laughed, loudly and boyishly. Heads turned at the other tables. He blushed and lowered his voice. “Not unless attending one lecture by Jack London counts. It amused me to hear the great individualist of our time talking about the will of the masses.”
She was relieved, although scarcely mollified. It was a most cynical-sounding denial. “You should make an effort to get along with your father. All this rebellion can only make you bitter.”
He touched her hand again, this time without patronizing her. “I’ll try. I’m sorry the men in your life are so difficult.”
“They’re men.”
“Upon my word, Mother, you’re becoming quite the wit. If I didn’t know better I’d swear you’d been sneaking out to the Temple Theater and watching Fields and Webber.”
“I’m not my pictures, Harlan.”
She had surprised him twice in the space of a few seconds. The realization filled her with guilty pleasure. She was grateful that their order arrived at just that moment. The mood dissipated as the waiter leaned forward to transfer the cups and dishes from his tray to the table.
She forced a crabmeat sandwich on Harlan, who was no match for a mother’s determination. “I don’t believe that story about eating at Dolph’s Saloon. I don’t know when you eat at all. When you’re not working at your father’s, you’re spending your dinner break meeting with automobile men and touring manufactories. What you need is a wife who will take care of you.”
“I agree. I can’t think why women aren’t throwing themselves at me all the time. I look so dashing in my work overalls.”
“If women cared about such things, none of the men who work for you on the loading dock would be married. I happen to know most of them are. Who do you think makes up gift baskets for them and their families at Christmas? If I had grandchildren to fuss over, I wouldn’t have to fuss over you.” A splinter of grief stabbed her at the memory of Katherine’s children, dead these eight years.
“That’s bribery, Mother.” But he wolfed down the sandwich and poured coffee after it.
She watched him. “I miss you, Harlan. The house has been too quiet since you moved out. Sometimes I think I can hear you moving around in your old room, pacing back and forth the way you used to. Then I go up and everything is covered with sheets.”
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