by Paul Collins
“Yes,” he’d said in his usual curt manner. “I will be there at half past one o’clock.”
It was inadvisable for Patrick to inquire too deeply; there was simply too much else to attend to, with all the duties bestowed by Parkman upon his single manservant. With breakfast finished, it was getting past nine, after all, and the doctor wished to go and make his business calls; he must have his stick and his silk top hat. Thus suitably attired, he exited into the morning sunshine of Walnut Street. He walked with his customary stiff and impatient gait past a brief stretch of Boston Common and up to another Beacon Hill home one block away—a Joy Street mansion nearly as fine as his own, that of his brother-in-law, Robert Gould Shaw.
Their neighborhood held an unusual excitement that morning, literally burbling and rushing all around them: one block past Shaw’s house, the city’s immense new public works building, the Beacon Hill Reservoir, opened its valves for the first time at nine o’clock. It augured a newer, greater Boston; the city’s population had already more than doubled in just the last generation, and with Ireland now in the fourth year of a potato famine, city neighborhoods overflowed with new immigrants. Boston had already been drawing running water from Lake Cochituate for a year now, creating a delighted frenzy of overwatering by wealthy residents who were, as one newspaper put it, “procuring elastic pipes, by means of which they are able to sprinkle the streets, wash the sidewalks, and clean their windows.” Thanks to the mania for garden hoses, they mockingly warned, “Boston will be transformed into a blueberry swamp . . . navigable only by canal-boats and skiffs.” With the addition of the local reservoir, and its promise of “a perpetual supply of pure water to the citizens of Boston,” dwellings in the booming city would become even more valuable to landowners like Shaw and Parkman.
As the ordinary citizenry gawped at the gush of waters into the reservoir, the two men made their pilgrimage, as was their wont, to the local bank. Much of the route was along the improbably tranquil common, an open space that became all the more precious as the city grew. The park, if anything, had only become more green and pleasant in recent years: the old wooden benches had been replaced with wrought-iron ones to discourage idlers from whittling at the slats, and the police had swept through to throw out the scruffy boys bathing in the Frog Pond, the better to protect the sensibilities of promenading Beacon Hill residents like Shaw and Parkman.
They’d been in-laws for decades, and as graying men of business, they found that their concerns now turned as often to family as to money; George had one daughter and Robert had three, all in delicate health. Robert had been sending his to a mineral spa in Vermont. “Some of the patients bathe six times a day,” he’d patiently explain, ever the hopeful father. “And drink water twelve times.”
This sounded rather like idleness, not to mention an unnecessary expense, given the new reservoir. In any case, the stern old doctor had his own long-standing preference, one that included keeping patients industrious and on the blandest of food. His clientele of old, it was true, had largely been unhealthy of mind rather than body, but he held that a “stimulating diet is fuel to their disease.”
The vexing ailments of those around them was a cruel irony; here were two wealthy pillars of society, and one of them a doctor at that, both facing the stubborn ill health of their own families that neither money nor skill could quite cure. The two gentlemen parted by the Merchant Bank on State Street, where their fortunes, at least, remained healthy. The sums moving through their accounts—thousands, tens of thousands of dollars at a time—hinted, like the water coursing through the neighborhood’s Cochituate pipes, at some much larger and more powerful accumulation stored up in Beacon Hill.
DR. PARKMAN walked between the imposing exterior columns of the Merchant Bank, dodging the pigeons that nestled on its marble pediment—the subject of some local amusement, as they exerted a humbling influence on the top-hatted gentlemen below. The bank had tried to scare the birds away by installing a fearsome wooden cat, only to find the winged miscreants perching atop their would-be grimalkin; finally, the hapless feline was moved inside to drolly overlook the bank’s boardroom.
Not everyone found humor in their visits to the bank, least of all Parkman.
“The devil you have!” he’d snap at the clerks.
It was unwise to err with funds that were rightfully those of Dr. George S. Parkman. For much was rightfully his; he’d inherited a sizable fortune from his father, Samuel Parkman. The elder Parkman was an India merchant who had built a fortune on silks and indigo, and since then, his son had enlarged the family fortune through canny land deals across the West End. When the value of his riverfront land was threatened by a proposed new bridge, he lobbied against development; when the value was improved by extending a wharf, he lobbied for it. In the past year alone, he and Shaw were on record for 111 real estate transactions, and at length he’d hired his own agent, Mr. Kingsley, to deal with the sheer volume of work. That just made the occasion of a personal visit by Parkman all the more discomfiting for the bank personnel. The old doctor covered his fiscal precincts on foot, and he berated dilatory bank clerks and tenants very much in person.
Politely inquiring if a mistake had been made in his accounts did not notably improve Parkman’s temper.
“I should think,” he’d replied icily to one clerk, “that you might judge so, from my manner.”
The doctor marched back out onto State Street, headed in his usual double time to those West End tenants and business partners who needed encouragement in paying their bills. Much had changed on this block since he’d taken over his father’s estate, some two decades ago. Back then, the Merchant’s Bank was still an outpost of the federal U.S. Bank; across the street from its grand columns, in a tidy allegory of power, had been the local whipping post, a brutally stout wooden beam painted a bloody red. Parkman could still recall when thieves here were also thrust into a sturdy set of stocks, to be mocked and pelted with rubbish by passersby—a punishment inaugurated by the carpenter who built them, since he was promptly clapped into his own contraption for overbilling the city for his work.
The law was not quite so harsh and unyielding now, though perhaps that was to change again. In that morning’s Daily Bee, an editorial supporting Mayor John Bigelow lashed out against the simpering ways of Bostonian reformers. “SYMPATHY FOR MURDERERS,” the headline scoffed. The mayor needn’t worry: there was no danger of such softheartedness from George Parkman. Just this year he’d sent a fellow to prison for theft—his old manservant, Patrick’s ill-fated predecessor, an Irishman who’d stolen $1,500 in cash, plus over $300 in checks and gold coins and silver, from the back of a closet in the mansion. Parkman noticed the loss right away, of course, but foolishly went to the police, who, instead of arresting the ungrateful servant on the spot, spent three weeks tailing him. Officer Clapp discovered that, though the servant claimed to be unmarried, he had a wife and kids secretly living in another house; they found there some china he’d stolen from the mansion, and a stolen dress, too. All very well, but the money, the money, had seeped away: when officers finally collared the scoundrel as he reported to work in the morning, they could scarcely recover a tenth of the cash. Being robbed was outrageous enough for Parkman, but the public revelation of it was almost worse—not to mention the newspapers blurting out that much of the money had not been recovered.
Parkman walked purposefully toward the river, to the blocks where his rents and holdings multiplied fruitfully. Prosecuting the servant had been a mistake, perhaps; Parkman’s fearsome reputation came from enforcing his deals and exacting his penalties in person, eschewing the courts and meddlesome lawyers.
“Never go to law,” the old doctor now held. Nobody need know the details of anyone’s finances except for himself and trusted associates like Mr. Shaw. “Bad business, bad business, friend,” he vowed. “Never go to law.”
HEAVE.
The men and horses strained, the cart rocking tantalizingly forward, then stubbo
rnly falling back into the mud by the corner of Fruit Street.
Heave.
Again it rocked forward, then back. It wasn’t moving. The reason why was no mystery: the cart was loaded with pig iron, now maddeningly stranded yards from its North Grove Street destination at the Fuller foundry, where it was to be smelted and refined into castings. Two horses could be expected to steadily pull a cart loaded with a ton of pig iron, but in these muddy and mercantile streets by the Charles River, the task was becoming impossible. The streets were busy with Harvard students headed across the street to the medical school. Collegiate wits could take a certain amusement in the hauler being named Marsh, yet being defied by the sopping-wet land around him. Men from the foundry regarded the scene with detachment, and local children, racing a school late-bell in returning from their lunches, stopped for a moment to gawk at the two horses straining to dislodge their load.
Heave.
It would take a while; the horses couldn’t do it on their own, and the driver at least showed enough forbearance not to whip them. The schoolboys moved on, and the ironworkers finally returned to rolling their heavy castings over for weigh-in, where foundry master Albert Fuller paused from the heat of his building to look back out into the street.
Afternoon, Doctor.
Dr. Parkman bowed to him, scarcely breaking his quick stride. Fuller knew him well enough, as did any businessman here; Parkman was one of the great landowners of this neighborhood. It was the doctor who owned the land under the foundry, after all—and who had owned the land across from the foundry, and donated it for the new Medical College building. This was a bafflingly generous act for the thrifty old man, so much so that Oliver Wendell Holmes had been promptly named to a newly created Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology.
Then again, though his business was as a landlord and developer, Dr. Parkman had taken some pains to live up to his medical title. He remained a member of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, and he still contributed the occasional squib to the pages of its newsletter. And he’d kept the same listing in the city directory for decades: Parkman George, physician, house 8 Walnut. No mention of being a landlord, or of not keeping hours anymore.
Medicine had been the job he had chosen, rather than tending to the family fortune, which had chosen him; and for a great many years before he began running these neighborhood properties, doctoring had been the focus of his life. He’d suffered poor health in his own childhood, and this had given him a sense of direction; after entering Harvard at scarcely fifteen, and graduating in 1809, he’d turned to a career in medicine. The young Parkman scion scarcely needed the money, which was just as well; the local rate for house calls was $1.50, with an extra fifty cents to board a ship in the harbor. His doctoring was more out of a sense of noblesse oblige; he served as a medical surgeon for the Massachusetts militia, and during the city’s smallpox and cholera epidemics had offered some of his many homes as field hospitals.
This neighborhood was Parkman’s history writ large. Turning away from the local firms he extracted rent from, and away from the medical college whose grounds he had donated, and looking down North Grove Street, one simply faced another old Parkman property: a riverside lot he’d sold to the city, and which now had the new Suffolk County Jail rising upon it.
This, too, seemed fitting. Dr. Parkman had known a number of accused men over the years, with his expert courtroom testimony as a physician saving some and damning others. In his early years as a doctor, he’d been called into a trial over the death of a prostitute, Pamela Percy; her pimp was accused of beating her, but Parkman’s postmortem found that she’d downed at least seven glasses of brandy before a likely tumble down some stairs. He was just as formidable when called upon by prosecutors, though. He’d attended to the first Boston policeman to die in the line of duty, Jonathan Houghton; the constable was drunkenly assaulted on the docks while arresting a friend of the accused. Dr. Parkman testified that five of Houghton’s ribs were broken, two of them piercing his lung and liver. “I have no doubt but that the deceased died in consequence,” he informed the court, and his statement sent the assailant to Boston’s scaffold.
But at this moment, strolling down Fruit Street, the doctor’s thoughts turned instead to—groceries.
He was already carrying one small parcel, and he paused in the doorway of the local corner grocer, in the manner of all men trying to recollect what they were supposed to buy their family at the shop. His son George Jr. was in Paris, which simplified things, but there were still his wife and daughter to consider. Finally, Dr. Parkman strolled in and bowed stiffly to the storekeeper.
I require crushed sugar, Mr. Holland.
The expensive white variety—some thirty-two pounds of it, enough for the teas and sweetmeats of many a visitor on business. The grocer fussed over finding a receptacle for so much sugar; the doctor calmly pointed to a bucket, and watched carefully as it was weighed two, then three times, so as to subtract the receptacle’s tare weight. Some grocers were known for including the weight of bags, buckets, and thumbs in the weighing out of sugar, and Dr. Parkman was not a man to be taken in by humbug. He then directed the grocer to cut off a six-pound portion from a firkin of butter, and to have both sent over to his mansion on Walnut Street, “any time in the afternoon,” he added.
As the grocer worked away under the doctor’s watchful eye, the inevitable bothersome neighbor used the pause to accost them for pleasantries.
Fine weather today, Doctor.
Dr. Parkman was not a man given to small talk; but for a moment, regarding the sunny November day outside, he almost seemed to find cause for cheerfulness.
“We cannot find fault with such weather as this,” he finally admitted.
Parkman took up his stick and hat to leave, and paused once again in the doorway; he was still carrying a closed-up paper bag from another shop. He leaned over the counter to Mr. Holland.
Might I leave this with you for five minutes?
Of course the venerable doctor might; the grocer gingerly placed it behind his counter. And with that, Dr. George Parkman walked out of the shop and into a faultless Boston afternoon.
Holland followed soon after, off to take his lunch; when he returned, he was surprised to find the bag still there. Not too surprised, mind you: customers left all sorts of unaccountable things in shops. And so there it remained behind the counter for the rest of the afternoon, until, as the early November dusk stole over the neighborhood, the grocer finally peeked inside the bag.
Lettuce. That was it: one head of lettuce. It was a greenhouse delicacy this late in the season, and just the sort of bland stuff Dr. Parkman would buy for his sickly daughter. Well, he’d remember and be back for it on the morrow. Or perhaps not; some of these old fellows would forget their own heads if they weren’t fastened to their bodies.
6
A GENTLEMAN UNKNOWN
IT WAS ALL MOST IRREGULAR. IN THIRTEEN YEARS OF WORKING for George Parkman, Charles Kingsley had scarcely ever known his employer to be late for anything—particularly his mealtimes at home. Nor were there many days in which the old man did not consult him on running his properties. And so Kingsley had come by at three p.m. on Friday, his customary half hour into Parkman’s late lunch, when the doctor would be ready to lean back from his meal and dictate filings and lease decisions to him. Except the doctor wasn’t in, and his baffled manservant seemed unable to account for the absence. Stopping by again on Friday at dinnertime had not helped either; Dr. Parkman was still out.
And that was what brought Kingsley back at seven forty-five on Saturday morning. The agent’s breath hung in the early morning air as he waited in front of the grand entrance of the mansion. The door swung open, and he stepped into the atrium, which the manservant kept as ready as ever for its daily procession of tenants and business partners. But there was an unaccustomed silence in the house; the doctor’s impatient footfall did not answer him, and the worried expression on Mrs. Parkman’s face told K
ingsley everything.
He’s not been back, she fretted.
The house was lonely—alarmingly so—with George Jr. off in Paris, and now Dr. Parkman not home for the night; there was only Mrs. Parkman and their ailing daughter left. It was simply not like him to leave them like that.
Word was sent a block over to Robert Gould Shaw to come quickly to his brother-in-law’s house. Together, they pieced together Parkman’s Friday schedule. He’d gone out to the bank with Shaw, briefly stopped back at the house again around noon, and then went on to make his usual rounds. He’d had some sort of appointment at one-thirty p.m., though the manservant couldn’t remember the morning caller who had made it; Shaw couldn’t recall Parkman mentioning it, either.
And that was it: he’d been due back at the house at two-thirty p.m., and none of them had seen or heard from him since noon of that day. With as much gentle reassurance as they could muster to Mrs. Parkman—why, any number of things could detain a busy man like her husband!—Shaw left Kingsley in charge of matters at the mansion and walked out into the brightening morning to make inquiries.
With each block he covered, though, the matter only darkened. There was no sight of the doctor quickly marching home, his chin up in the air, no hint of his unmistakable silhouette on the common, cutting through the morning fog in anger at having been detained so unforgivably late across town. There was, quite simply, no Dr. Parkman to be seen at all.