by Gay Talese
On their way home from the wedding, the doctor pointed out to Esther the small stone building where he had first attended school. It was two miles from the farm and was now surrounded by weeds. He told her that Asher had attended the same school but had dropped out after two years. The doctor remained there to complete the six-year course, leading his class academically, as he always would at the country high school. His aunt Martha had mentioned the special interest that a certain teacher had taken in him, and, with some financial help from an affluent Quaker pharmacist in the town of New Hope, the teacher had facilitated Richard’s entry into the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1872, where there were Quakers on the faculty and the board of trustees. Richard graduated from there with top honors, as he subsequently did as a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. Befriending his classmate, the wealthy Keasbey, had been essential to launching their pharmaceutical firm; but it was Dr. Mattison who had made the business successful.
The doctor was an energetic entrepreneur as well as an exploring scientist. He was a doer as much as a dreamer. He was, in Esther’s opinion, most likely a genius. And in believing this, she found it unnecessary to understand rationally every aspect of his ascendancy from rusticity to majestic pretensions. If that was how the doctor wished to live in this free country, then he had earned the prerogative to do so. Her role was not to regulate him, as her soldierly English father had tried to regulate her, all but forbidding her courtship with the then dirt-poor pharmacy student; her role as his wife was to encourage him, as his aunt Martha had done. And so Esther did not take issue with the doctor when their marital life in later years became excessively sumptuous and unreal. She did not question him when he ordered a castlelike façade to cover the surface of their mansion; or when he insisted on naming their second son Royal; or when he spent a fortune in Munich to have three castle gates designed and forged by some of the costliest artisans in Europe. The walls around his estate also were made higher at this time, for the doctor complained of needing more privacy. His business empire was growing, there were more demands on his time, and every day people were arriving unannounced at the castle seeking alms, or loans, or dispensation from their debts. He was not only the chief operating officer of the asbestos firm but also the landlord of four hundred domiciles, the sole provider of all their coal, water, and steam; he was the director of the First National Bank of Ambler, the president of the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, and a board member of several companies around the nation and overseas. There were times when he simply did not want to see anybody, and his orders were strictly enforced by the guards posted behind the gates with their sidearms and mastiffs.
Late on a summer Sunday afternoon, while the doctor and Mrs. Mattison were having tea on the veranda with two important Canadian mining officials and their wives, Mrs. Mattison heard the dogs barking in the distance more persistently than usual, and minutes later she overheard the conversation of a guard in the pantry reporting to the butler that there was an angry man at the gates who stubbornly refused to leave until he had met face to face with Dr. Mattison.
“It’s a barefoot fellow with some woman in a dirty old carriage,” Mrs. Mattison overheard the guard telling the butler. “And this fellow claims he’s the doctor’s brother!”
The superintendent, Devine, was then in a remote part of the estate, overseeing the repairs being done on the drainage system at Loch Alsh, which had overflowed during a rainstorm; and an inexperienced guard, who was filling in this weekend, had taken the liberty of coming directly to the castle rather than taking the trouble to track down Devine. It had been many years since Mrs. Mattison had seen Asher and Hulda; decades had passed since their wedding, and Mrs. Mattison had revisited the farm only to attend funerals—the first for the doctor’s father; the next for his mother; and finally for his maiden aunt Martha, who died peacefully in her sleep in the largest bedroom in the farmhouse. During these brief visits the doctor had seemed less cordial to Asher than before, possibly because the latter was planting unproductively and was neglecting the upkeep of the property, including the once elegant carriage that had been the couple’s wedding gift. Esther had discovered that Asher had sawed off the roof to make it into an open vehicle, and he seemed to be using it more for hauling dirt and wood than for the purpose for which it was designed and constructed.
Now as the butler stepped out onto the veranda, carrying a silver tray with a note that was intended for her eyes only, Mrs. Mattison looked across the table toward her husband. Although he continued conversing with their guests, she could tell he was distracted. He, too, had overheard the guard. She was sure of it from the ashen tone that had just come into his face, and from the panic she saw in his eyes during the single second she had gotten his attention; and his wishes regarding this situation seemed very clear to her.
“The doctor and I do not wish to be disturbed by anyone,” Mrs. Mattison said to the butler standing at her side, and she waved away the note without reading it. The doctor paused in his conversation, nodded, then redirected his attention to the guests.
“The individual is quite insistent,” the butler added, before turning to leave.
“Well,” Mrs. Mattison said, as politely as she could, “tell the guard to be even more insistent.”
Asher and Hulda Mattison were soon confronted by four guards and their dogs; and although Asher’s profanity could be heard high above the barking, he finally did back the coach out onto the main road and become resigned to the fact that he would not be paying the doctor a Sunday visit. Hulda, in her quiet way, was more enraged than her husband. She had just purchased a red taffeta cape for the occasion, and midway during their journey back to the farm another rainstorm descended upon the region. The dye in Hulda’s new cape soon drained out of the fabric, covering her dress and her arms with red splotches and streaks.
When she returned home, she hung it to dry, but it was forever ruined. Still, she kept the cape throughout the rest of her life (she would die in 1935), and hung it above the mantel, a red flag that would always remind her of the day when she had been turned away by the doctor, a man to whom she would never speak again, or allow to reenter the home in which he had been born.
34.
The doctor’s second wife, the crippled Mary Mattison, who since her auto accident viewed the entire world primarily through binoculars, had never been aware of seeing any Italians in her entire life until she married the doctor in 1920 and moved from Princeton to Ambler; now, however, she saw almost nothing but Italians every time she looked down from her turret window, and often she wished she could change the scenery.
In her isolation as the mistress of the castle, and captive in her wheelchair as her husband moved freely through the town, Mary Mattison watched the Italians digging ditches and laying pipe around the malfunctioning front fountain; they seemed to her grimier than the dirt they wallowed in, and they apparently thought nothing of urinating in broad daylight. The Italian gardeners, though better paid than the common laborers, appeared no more trustworthy. With infuriated amazement, Mrs. Mattison would see them pretend to be devotedly clipping hedges around the service entrance just as the delivery truck arrived, loaded with household supplies; and as the unsuspecting driver was knocking on the kitchen door waiting for the butler or the cook to unlock it, the Italians would swiftly move in under the canvas covering of the vehicle and take everything they could, concealing it in their shirts or in their large refuse sacks. There was nothing they would not steal: bottles of seltzer, rolls of toilet paper, cans of floor wax, boxes of dressmaker’s pins, candles, flypaper, and the doctor’s favorite foamy bath oil from Cologne even though none of these Italians owned a bathtub—or so she assumed from the looks of them.
Irked as she was, Mrs. Mattison was slow in complaining to the superintendent or to the police about these offenses, but not out of any compassion for the lowly Italians. Nor was she trying to preserve the domestic tranquillity she knew the doctor wanted and deserved once he r
eturned from a busy day at the office (this was also why she had avoided mentioning the liaisons of his son Royal with the woman on Highland Avenue). No, Mary Mattison’s delay in this situation was entirely self-centered and explainable with one word: fear. She feared that harm would come to her if she informed against the Italians. She was virtually surrounded by Italians, and she suspected that if she induced the police or the superintendent to take action against the gardeners, her role as informant would leak out sooner or later and she would be vulnerable to their vendettas. She may not have known any Italians before coming to Ambler, but she certainly knew about Italian vendettas. Newspapers had long been writing about the grudge crimes of Italian gangmen in Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere; and there was no reason to assume that there were not some gang members in Ambler, a few vicious schemers who would contrive to deal with her in any number of subtle and sinister ways.
One day she read that humble Italian-born laborers in America were also capable of committing great atrocities: A factory worker named Sacco and a fish peddler named Vanzetti had been arrested on charges of shooting the paymaster in a shoe factory in New England and running off with fifteen thousand dollars. While both claimed to be innocent men who had come to America to earn a decent living, they were identified as anarchists. It was no wonder the United States government was now limiting the number of newcomers to Ellis Island, especially those from places in southern Europe like Italy. But it was already too late to halt their flow into Ambler.
More than half of the Keasbey & Mattison factory employees, the construction workers, and the castle crew under William Devine were Italian by birth or heritage. Fortunately for Mary Mattison, her husband did not permit any Italians to live on the castle grounds, or to rent homes near Trinity Memorial Church or elsewhere close to the Mattisons’ private estate. The row of spired and turreted mansions on Lindenwold Terrace, beyond the north gate of the castle, was occupied by people whom the doctor himself had screened and accepted as desirable neighbors. Originally these mansions were intended for his top executives (before he decided he did not want any); and so now the residences were the domiciles of his son Royal and his family, and certain socially prominent Pennsylvanians who did not work for the doctor but who attended his Episcopal church, or who offered compatible company and useful connections.
Southwest of the castle’s front gate, beyond the Bethlehem Turnpike, which edged past the lawn of Trinity Memorial Church, were rows of three-story stone houses with spires and finials, which were rented out to native-born American white-collar workers and plant superintendents of Keasbey & Mattison (including the commuting sales representative of whose wife Royal Mattison was fond); and farther downhill were rows of less decorative dwellings for foremen and favored workers, who might be of Quaker background, or with roots in Germany, England, Ireland, or Scandinavia.
Still farther downhill, along the other side of the railroad tracks, close to the factories, were the simple stone row houses and frame buildings occupied by the Italians. Dr. Mattison had named one of the streets there in honor of General Garibaldi, thinking it would instill some ethnic pride in the Italian quarter; but soon the street sign had been pulled down, and Devine heard from a workman that some of the Italians were less than worshipful of Garibaldi. What the Italians did worship, as Mrs. Mattison could see through her powerful lenses, was the statue of the brown-robed monk that they carried around their neighborhood on their shoulders on feast days and other holidays, when they would also pin dollar bills on the long ribbons attached to the figure; and often they dressed their children in brown-hooded robes with rope belts in imitation of the saint. Not Mrs. Mattison alone, but the majority of non-Italian Ambler residents, thought that the display of a holy statue festooned with money was in poor taste and quite primitive; and she was not surprised to learn that the Italians were not encouraged by the town’s Irish Catholics to attend Mass at Saint Anthony’s—which was why the Italians had built Saint Joseph’s, a short walk from where they lived.
On Sundays, the one day the plant was closed, Mrs. Mattison would sometimes watch the Italian women going to Mass with their children, while the men strolled in an open field near the church, arm in arm, walking in circles. Rising in the background behind the tracks were the high-peaked factory buildings with their smokestacks, and a white cliff composed of asbestos waste. She had no idea how many Italians resided in this area, for she had heard that a goodly number had entered the United States illegally and borrowed the work cards of registered Italian employees to clock time on the night shift, later sharing the proceeds with their countrymen. But on Sundays it did not matter to her how many Italians were assembled in Ambler, for they were all at a safe distance. On Mondays, however, the five forty-five a.m. steam whistle alerted them for work; and at daybreak, as the dogs barked, she knew that the gardeners and other laborers had arrived at the castle.
Devine was always at the service gate with the guards to meet them, to count them and check their identity papers before allowing them to proceed back to the barns where their tools and overalls were kept. He would then drive around the estate in one of the doctor’s locomobiles to check on what the other workmen were doing, and by seven-fifty sharp he would be in the pantry to inform the butler that the doctor’s limousine was waiting to take him to the office. Mrs. Mattison and the doctor had completed breakfast in the dining room by this time, and, as a parting gesture of affection, the doctor himself would carry her in his arms up the staircase to her studio in the turret—where, until the doctor’s return for lunch, she would spend the morning reading, writing letters, crocheting, and observing the activities and foibles of God’s creatures below.
Only the squirrels—graceful and quick, always alert, never lazy—met with her constant approval. She could watch them for hours and did, focusing in on them through her glasses as they climbed up and down trees, and scampered across the lawn and around the fountains in tireless pursuit of whatever morsels of nourishment sustained their energy; although there were hundreds of them, of different colors and sizes, she never once saw them fighting among themselves, or disturbing the doctor’s flower beds, or rummaging through the trashcans in the backyard like the pilfering Italian gardeners. One day she had caught the gardeners pulling out some of the doctor’s discarded clothing, including his long johns and the stained top hat that he used to wear to the opera and that, at her urging, he had finally replaced; the old hat had a frayed brim and its crown was coming loose, and she was glad to see it go—except now it was back again, on the head of a little Italian gardener! With the hat down over his ears, he was strutting around the yard to the amusement of his friends—and to such resentment on her part that she came very close to contacting Devine. What most offended her was the gardener’s increasing brazenness the longer he wore the hat. No doubt encouraged by the roars of approval he was getting, he suddenly had the temerity to try to imitate Dr. Mattison! He pushed the hat up on his head and tilted it to one side, as the doctor had worn it, and he moved with exaggeratedly long strides, his hands clasped behind his back, as the doctor did while walking. This rude little Italian was mimicking the very man who was saving him from poverty!
So angry that her hands shook, Mary Mattison picked up the phone on her desk, but she had difficulty dialing Devine’s number, even though it consisted of only two digits. And then when she did dial it, and had heard the phone ring once, she suddenly hung up. She was frustrated and confused. What good could come of reporting this to Devine? What could he do except scold the Italian, and then reclaim the top hat and the long johns and whatever else they stole, and then what could he do with it? Burn it? Burn it with the leaves that were piled high in the backyard and were torched twice weekly by these very same Italians? Who could be sure they wouldn’t let the fire get out of control?
Removing her hand from the phone that rested next to her binoculars, Mary wondered, not for the first time, whether it was in anyone’s best interest for her to be s
eeing so much. Was it her duty to spy for her husband, to serve as his second pair of eyes so that he, or his superintendent, could deal with the indiscretions that transpired in his absence? If, on the other hand, he did not rely on her for added vigilance, why then did he give her the binoculars?
Mary Mattison’s main pleasure nonetheless remained watching the squirrels, which became her favorite, though distant, companions through the summer of 1920, when she was unable to be in Newport. She could identify many of them individually by their stripes and varying patches of color, by the length of their bodies, the shape of their tails and ears. Many had long, beautiful ears. But there was one reddish squirrel that had a uniquely high tuft of hair on the tip of each ear. Nearly all had eyes like tiny bright round buttons, but a few had eyes that were almond-shaped and more deeply set. Some had extremely bushy tails; some tails were more black than gray, or were chestnut red, or a blend of all three. Some squirrels were striped along the bottom of their bodies, while others were uniform in color. Their claws varied in shape; they ran in different ways; one squirrel had a permanently injured left front foot but seemed as swift as the others, covering three feet per second at full speed—which was attained whenever a stone landed nearby, hurled by some heartless Italian. Some squirrels lived entirely in the trees, others spent all their time on the ground, and on hot summer days Mary observed a number of baby squirrels with their mothers cooling off at the base of a fountain, just within reach of the soft spray.