Not getting his long-overdue apology, Gower turned back to the parade. He’d never forget.
Bastard. Joseph rubbed his chin with the stub of his pinkie. Good riddance.
The roar of the Connecticut’s big guns tore through the Granite Block. Thirty thousand textile workers ducked, screamed, and then leaped to their feet and leaned on the shoulders of the person in front of them. Children cried. Women swooned. Men shouted. Mr. President! Mr. President! Over here! Over here! From the review stand, the Mayflower’s own band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Taft stood in the back of his black Buick touring car, waving his black silk top hat at the crowd. A dozen army regulars from Fort Adams and the president’s security detail surrounded the car as the crowd lurched closer. The short route to the review stand was lined with letter carriers waving American flags. Taft plucked a flag from a man’s breast pocket. He waved it high above his head. When the crowd roared its approval, the commander in chief smiled, showing his strong teeth. He wobbled toward the review stand. He was wide bodied and stout, resembling a potato with arms and legs. Music blew from all directions. Confetti sailed across the grandstand and down onto the legions in the street. Gobs of the stuff, like colored snow, fluttered into Joseph’s ears and mouth. He could already imagine the headline in the late editions: taft declares fall river presidential city. The guns continued, boom! boom! boom! Twenty-one shots rocked the grandstand. Noisemakers squealed. Children were hoisted onto shoulders. The hatband slogans and pennants blurred and the crowd surged forward as Taft mounted the podium stairs. There he is! There’s the president!—I can’t see!—There! On the stage!—I see him! I see him! A man on the Parade Committee knocked Joseph’s shoulder; he shouted into Joseph’s ear, “We did it! A red-letter day. The goddamn president in Fall River.”
Joseph forced a smile. “Heck of a day,” he said. But the man shook his head and pointed to his ear and then looked back to Taft, still waving the miniature flag.
* * *
The carnival midway ran down the length of Pleasant Street. The commotion from city hall rolled past the dunking booth, the three-hundred-pound woman, and the incredible shrinking man, past pigs on spits and puddles of ale, past mounds of lemon rinds and elephant dung. At the end of the midway, the roar of the Connecticut’s big guns was reduced to a faint tremor deep within the bowels of the fun house.
Hollister Bartlett, Joseph’s oldest son, pushed his palm up his runny nose and then wiped his hand down his trouser leg. The touch of the flu he had woken up with that morning would be a worthy excuse for dropping out of the boxing competition. He sat on an upended mop bucket nestled in a fluffy bed of work rags and burlap that filled the cramped space with the smell of oil and straw. The closet was pitch black, reminding him of his mother’s room. The ride operator, already in his cups, had given Hollister a key and three minutes to find the storage closet hidden in the Hall of Mirrors. “Behind the famine panel,” the operator had joked, pocketing Hollister’s dollar bribe. Hollister pressed his ear to the back of the warped mirror and smiled. “Famine panel,” he said, just now getting it. The mirror squeezed the life from you.
Out of habit, Hollister snapped open his grandfather’s pocket watch but couldn’t decipher the hands. When he had handed his girl-of-the-month the two-cent admission, he’d instructed her to enter alone. Maria was the oldest yet—nearly twenty, a good four years older than himself. Their code word was “spider.”
Hollister worked after school managing all the women’s accounts in his father’s mill store. Maria got hired in the card room beside her mother when her father lost his job on a New Bedford fishing boat. In two weeks, Hollister’s eraser had worn her charge sheet thin in places. Two yards of cloth had become three yards. A quarter pound of sugar became a half. And unluckily for Maria, her account swelled even when she wasn’t shopping. Hollister had gone out of his way midmonth to inform her of her cash deficit, something he told her he “didn’t do for all the girls.” Maria understood the word “deficit” because the landlord spoke of her father’s debt each month. Hollister pulled her to the end of the counter and said, “There are other ways, creative ways, to pay off the debt.” Hollister’s pride and ambition were matched only by his ability to spot weakness.
“Spider. Spider.” Maria inched into the Hall of Mirrors, tiptoeing forward as if bracing for a blow. “Spider. Spider.” The first mirror gave her three heads. The next blew up her pencil-thin frame like a soaked sponge.
Hollister set his hand on the latch to open the panel, then sat back down. He still hadn’t figured what he was going to do with her. She was the prettiest of the five he’d outwitted. Unlike the pampered Highlands girls who still believed storks delivered babies, the immigrant girls knew hard knocks and a woman’s obligation. His previous four “dates” hadn’t uttered a word while he’d squeezed their small breasts and spastically humped their bare legs, and only one actually spoke. Her name was Viva, and she had asked him if he was proud of himself as she stepped out of the women’s latrine, adjusting her stockings one morning before the mill opened. Viva gave Hollister pause, and if she had pushed him further, asked him what his mother thought of him or why he couldn’t get a regular girl, he might have stopped altogether. But she hadn’t, or couldn’t, given she spoke little English.
“Spider. Spider.”
Only a freak would bother with these stupid girls, Hollister thought. Silly Highlands girls gave thrills if you bought them treats. And the dumb Irish, they charged a nickel a feel. The hell with Maria. Is it my fault her father couldn’t bait a hook? I could get her better jobs, but she has no imagination, no future.
“Spider. Spider.” Maria’s voice faded as she walked deeper into the fun house.
Let her die in the card room with her stupid mother. Freak.
* * *
Back on June Street, Bobbin, the more brazen of the Bartletts’ two cats, flopped down on a pillow, sticking her rear end in Elizabeth’s face. She rolled over for Evelyn to scratch her tummy. Instead, Evelyn deposited the cat on the foot of the bed, then jabbed her finger into the beast’s nose. “What have I said?” Evelyn hissed. “No sitting on the pillows.” Bobbin scrammed. Evelyn pulled the starched sheet over Elizabeth’s shoulder and laid her silky hair across the pillow. Streaks of gray dated the forty-three-year-old Elizabeth.
Evelyn thought she ought not wake her patient for tomato soup. She set the lunch tray on the nightstand and took up the Dickens novel she’d been reading aloud to Elizabeth. Instead of a day off to attend the carnival, as Evelyn had been promised but secretly dreaded, knowing she’d either be stuck tending her sister’s children or be paraded past would-be suitors (squeaky-wheeled Irishmen from the Globe neighborhood) by her matchmaking mother, Evelyn chose to lounge in the cozy window seat of her small room with Oliver Twist. She made a mental note to tell Elizabeth about the two goldfinches that had taken up in the old oak outside the kitchen window, and then remembered she must tell Albert to refill the feeder. Momentarily, but only momentarily, she listed the household chores left to finish: laundry, floors, ice to order. Luckily, Mr. Bartlett had been too preoccupied with the centennial to notice her falling off lately. She cursed the second girl, Leah, for leaving the washing unfinished. Evelyn heard a streetcar pass down the hill and wondered what mischief Leah would get into on the dirty carnival midway. It was no place for a lady. The hall clock struck three bells. A roar rolled up the hill. Elizabeth slept on.
* * *
By Helen Sheehan’s count, the president owed her ninety cents in lost tips and wages. She sat on Mrs. O’Donnell’s back stoop, tossing stones into an enamel dinner pail, waiting for the old biddy to fetch her wages. Usually Helen made two dinner runs between the mills and Mrs. O’Donnell’s. Eight pails to Anawan and eight to Cleveland; that’s sixteen pails. At a nickel a pop, that’s eighty cents, plus tips. But on account of Taft’s damn speech, and the party the owners were throwing for themselves, t
hey had done the unheard of—closed shop—and the last shift of the week tipped the largest.
Pie tins crashed in the pantry.
“Oh, cherries!” the old lady shouted, followed by “Peaches.” Pitted fruits were Mrs. O’s curses.
Helen called, “You okay, Mrs. O?”
“Another minute, sugarplum.”
Sweet old witch, Helen thought. But why store your loot on the highest shelf if you can’t reach it? She had a right mind to pack up and fetch the week’s wages on Monday, but the last time she did that, her mother had ripped on her. The fight had ended with Helen shouting, “All you care about is my money,” to which her widowed mother replied, “When the money stops coming, you die.”
Helen liked money—liked it fine—but her jobs stunk. They were the best-paying sidelines for a girl whose mother forbade her to work in the mills. She lifted the right leg of her brown trousers and scratched the dry skin on her calf. She was tall for her age, and fast. Taut muscles stretched over her thin bones. She kept her hair closely cropped around her heart-shaped face like the modern women she admired in magazines she nicked from Elizabeth Bartlett. As a young girl, her aunts and uncles had fawned over her comely looks. But Helen thought only people with money could afford to be beautiful, and dismissed her relatives as she did the boys’ whistles. Beauty meant being idle, and Helen was a worker. She had no time for stupid boys. And her brother Ray beat the lazy Irish boys who dared cast a lingering eye on his baby sister.
“How’s it coming, Mrs. O?”
When Helen really wanted something only a Highlands girl could afford, which was most everything, she stole it. She demanded honesty from everyone but herself. If her father hadn’t gotten himself killed at the mill, she would have had gooey licorice candies and baby dolls whose eyes shut when you laid them down to sleep. Her stealing kept her from getting angry at the world. The coins she managed to squirrel away from her mother were hidden under a warped floorboard in the hall closet, wrapped in her dead father’s linen handkerchief. Every Sunday after Communion she listed the junk she’d pinched for God. She was owed twice as much, given the circumstances. And besides, didn’t Mr. Bartlett always say everything came out in the wash?
After her father’s death, Helen hid most everything. The Highlands girls teased her for wearing trousers and her father’s old work shirts. The sons and daughters of mill workers were sympathetic on account of her father’s death. A third group theorized she just craved attention because her mother and brothers were all too busy to mind her, given their own jobs. Young Will Bartlett’s gang couldn’t figure Helen out for nothing. She was what the kids called “peculiar.” But he wanted to know her secrets.
By the end of the day, they’d have at least one thing in common.
* * *
Joseph spotted Massachusetts governor Foss on the review stand, sitting with Senator Crane among the president’s entourage of secretaries and centennial dignitaries. Congressman Greene stood a few feet to the side, straightening his blue silk bow tie. Mayor Higgins, flush from his introduction of the commander in chief, waved to friends in the wings. Phrases like “largest cotton manufacturing city in the country” and “many races, more cosmopolitan than many other large cities” and “men never possessed by a selfish or sordid motive” flew from his double-sided mouth, hot with civic pride.
The last boast seared Joseph’s skin. He looked over the grandstand to see if anyone else noted the irony of the statement, but no man met his eye. The other mill owners respected his intellect and work ethic, but the tragic mill fire that led to his running Cleveland Mill cast a long shadow. Few remembered his father, Otis. These men spun gold from cotton, or so they believed. Joseph sat down on the hard wood bleacher and slumped his long, thin frame forward over his knees; his youthful face could not hide the dark circles under his eyes.
Joseph recognized Matt Borden’s voice and lumbered to his feet. He quickly spotted the great man smack-dab in the center of the grandstand chatting with his son, Howard. Borden dabbed a white handkerchief to his bald pate and scratched his walrus mustache. He was well fed, like Taft. Howard checked his watch and whispered something to his father, who nodded in agreement. Matt Borden lived in New York, in part to keep his extended family of hangers-on at a distance. He had gone to considerable trouble and expense to erect a forty-five-foot mast atop his formidable American Printing Company to fly the Stars and Stripes. The flag greeted the Mayflower. Too much had been made of it. To the mill owners seated near Joseph, the flag wasn’t a symbol of America or Taft, but of Borden watching over the Manufacturers’ Association. Borden brushed confetti from his son’s shoulder as he peered into the swarm of newspapermen in the press section. Joseph couldn’t maneuver between the ladies’ hats to see who was catching Borden’s eye. More than one smut peddler had been rumored to be on Borden’s payroll.
Joseph heard rather clearly the Lancashire growl of George Pierce, the undersecretary of the United Textile Council, shouting something about the dissolution of Standard Oil, a topic sure to boil Yankee blood. Joseph smirked. He liked Pierce’s gall despite the fact that it might lead to Fall River’s downfall. Blackballed by British mills, Pierce came to America looking for a new fight, shouting or punching whatever itched his brain. Owners were “cockwinders,” and workers “builders.” Pierce’s arrogance, when mixed with the owner’s sense of entitlement, led to strikes and lockouts.
On the review stand, Taft set his silk hat on the podium and cleared his throat. “I esteem it a great privilege to be here to help you celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the great textile industry. When your committee, headed by your congressman, Mr. Greene, invited me to come here, I ventured to inquire whether any speech-making was necessary. I was told that was not important. All that was necessary was that you should see me.” Taft stepped back from the podium and the crowd roared. “I venture to think that if there is any street in Fall River that I have not traversed, it was because the committee forgot it.”
Standing between Matt Borden and George Pierce, Joseph realized that like the red section rope that divided owners from workers, he straddled two worlds but belonged to neither: the Protestant boardrooms of Matt Borden and the Lancashire toil of Pierce’s Episcopalian brothers with their lodges, clubs, and unions. Jefferson Cleveland and Otis were probably the last two men—owner and laborer, Protestant and Episcopalian—whose relationship wasn’t predicated on deceit. As a cotton agent and then mill owner, Joseph had tried to appease the Yankees—converted to their church, frequented the Q Club, learned golf; for God’s sake, he’d married a Yankee—but he would never be one of them.
Taft continued, “Therefore, I think I have had the pleasure of seeing most of the people of Fall River, as they have had the pleasure of seeing most of me.” The crowd erupted in laughter and applause. Men waved their straw and felt hats. Sunlight reflected off the president’s big teeth.
* * *
From his corner of the boxing ring, Will Bartlett searched for his father and Helen Sheehan in the graduated darkness. Men pointed to each corner and then exchanged handshakes or money. Others smacked a rolled program over their knee and chomped Henry Clays the city had imported from Cuba with the centennial seal on the band. The burning tobacco filled Will’s nostrils more than his own stinking sweat. He tried to think of a greater accomplishment in his young life than getting to this boxing final. Years of getting teased for his meager size—his mother promised he was a late bloomer—and look at him now, nearly the height of his brother and twice as strong. No high mark in school or mill chore had ever generated a crowd like this. And Hollister? Jerk.
Will squinted into the crowd. Of course, he had given up on his mother years ago, but his dad and Helen had promised. Stupid mill. Stupid cancer. Stupid Fall River.
Helen’s older brother Tommy worked Will’s corner, a towel draped over his neck. He snapped, “What you looking at?” He twi
sted the boy’s head forward.
Will avoided eye contact with him, had since the day Tommy got popped for welshing on a bet. The trauma had messed up his right eye, turning the white all soupy red around his iris—a real bloody blinker.
Tommy craned backward to survey the crowd. He still had one good eye. His pal from the newspaper flashed a thumbs-up and waved the list of bets he’d taken on Will. He rubbed his thumb across his index and middle fingers. Tommy saw green.
Tommy slapped Will’s sweaty back with his open palm. The crack turned heads. “The fight’s right here. They’ll be here. Focus on the madman.”
Damian paced the west end of the ring like a caged bull, reeling punches into the air, his hunched back extending his reach a few inches. Father Maxi called his name, and the boy pounded a combination off his own head. But he was running off the energy in the tent and off fear—the fear that no matter how hard he socked his old man, the bastard got up. Damian released another flurry off his own skull. The Highlands chancer was leaving in an eternity box.
The opening bell rang, and the boys shuffled to the center of the ring.
After three matches each, their movement was confined to the upper half of their torsos. Their feet rocked forward and back. The fatigue fogged their minds; technique was discarded. The crowd chanted, propelling their rubbery arms. Jabs gave way to wild roundhouse punches. The crowd jumped to their feet, cheering the boys’ wildness. Grown men shadowboxed in the aisles. In the ring, misguided palms and wrists caromed off shoulders and hips. By midround, Will’s neck was rubbed raw by the laces of Damian’s left glove. Maxi danced a two-step, up then back, separating the two. He shouted “fight” and “break up” in quick succession. Tommy shouted too—instructions he’d pounded into the boy’s head—but Will heard only his beating heart. Damian’s arms whirled as if he were clawing through a swarm of hornets. At the bell, he clawed faster. Will covered up. Separating the two, Father Maxi caught a punch square on the jaw.
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