Kings of the Sea
Page 61
“Kate would have come,” Christian said, “but she is ill. The doctors say terminally ill.”
“Oh, Christian!” Janice whispered, stricken.
David, completely uncharacteristically, put his arms around his father and held him tight. “Papa,” he said almost tentatively, the first time he had called him anything but the more formal Father in years.
Janice could not look at them without crying, so she picked up Christian’s valise and took it to the buggy, where Nefertiti waited patiently. Had there ever really been a time when there hadn’t been sorrow?
As before, Christian slept before dinner. When he came downstairs, he had a bottle of rum. “It’s not nearly as cold here as it is in Boston, I’ll grant you,” he said, “but a hot toddy should go down well all the same.”
David made the hot buttered rum. “Reminds me of the skating parties we used to have,” he said. Janice knew he was making a special effort for his father’s sake.
“I have a surprise for both of you,” she announced suddenly, feeling that this was as good a time as any.
They looked at her blankly. Surprise, at a time like this?
She went to the hall closet where she had hidden them and brought out two large sheets of heavy drafting paper on which had been carefully glued all those torn scraps from David’s office. She carried them into the sitting room and leaned them side by side against her chair. One was the drawing of the Alcyone from the outside, and the other a cutaway schematic of her insides, showing staterooms, dining rooms, grand saloon, bar, engine room, crews quarters, all of it. David’s jaw dropped, and then he looked at her in a way he never had before, a way in which once he might have looked at his Valerie.
Christian was astonished. “You did these, David?”
“Well, yes, before —”
“Surely the yard where you’re working isn’t capable of a ship like this?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Then you were going to come east to get it built?”
David took a deep breath. “No, I wasn’t. Morgan has bought up White Star and God knows how many other lines, and he and Cunard between them are going to squeeze everyone else dry competing with each other. You watch, prices for passenger fares will go to rock bottom on the Atlantic run.”
“I know, lad — all too well. There was a time when I would have fought him, but I didn’t think you had any interest in crass commercial shipping, so I made a deal with Morgan instead. Mark Poulson’s son Dick — named him after his grandfather, they did — has been running things as well as I could, maybe better. I sold to Morgan with the proviso that the boy would be able to go on doing what he’s doing now. I’m tired, and I want to spend whatever time is left with Kate. However, if you want to take over …”
“No, go ahead and sell, only keep the Blue Hand name,” David said. “We’ll need the money. The Atlantic run is overcrowded, and it’s going to become more so. The British, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, they’re all plunging into it. What I want to do is to start a fleet in the Pacific, brand-new ships, the lot. I’m naming my ships the Pleiades because I intend to build seven of them. The Alcyone is only the first. The British are our only real rivals here, and there’s plenty of room for seven more passenger liners. I’m glad you’re selling now when you can get something for all of it, because even so I’ll have to get money from the Poulsons and the Fines and anyone else I can talk into it.”
Janice remembered how supercilious he had been about being a salesman for Double, and smiled, but a look of pure triumph came across Christian’s face. “By God, after all these years —” He broke off. “You can’t make the engines here, you know.”
“Papa, I intend to leave here — there is nothing here for us now — and go back home for a couple of months. While I’m back there I intend to pick your brains, and Dick Poulson’s as well. In fact, if he wants to take a chance, I’ll make him a partner and to hell with Morgan. Then I’m going to go to England. Is Jack Carr still alive?”
“Surprisingly, he is. He wheezes and coughs until you think he’ll expire right there in front of you, but he keeps going, cigars and all. However, he’s been retired for more than ten years now, and that’s a long time in the shipbuilding business.”
“That’s all right. I’ll wager he knows exactly what they’re doing and thinking of doing with engines right now, and he’ll be bound to know which marine engines to use. After that, I plan to buy into a San Francisco shipyard and profit from making my own ships.”
“I thought you’d decided that making money was vulgar,” Christian ventured, wanting to be sure that David’s change of heart was real.
David shook his head. “After what I saw of the noble and patriotic sport of war, simply making money seems downright saintly. Let’s see — we can close up the house by the end of the week and send our household goods north to San Francisco to a warehouse. Papa, you can either go back now and be with Mama, or else we can all go back together. When we’re ready to head for San Francisco, Esperanza and her kids can join us there.” He was ticking off his points on his fingers.
“Just a minute,” Janice interrupted him. “Before you go any further, there are several large obstacles to all of this that apparently never occurred to you.”
“Oh?” David was nonplussed.
“First of all,” she said sweetly, “you never bothered to ask your father if he wanted to give all his money to someone who doesn’t know beans about the shipping business because he was running around the Philippines instead of making it his job to learn it. Second, you never bothered to ask me if I was willing to spend heaven knows how long in Boston and then move to San Francisco. I am a person, David, not a belonging, and I, too, happen to have a business, though I know that you don’t think what I do is important. However, for the first time in my life I have a feeling of worth because I am able to help people, and yes, I admit it, because that help is so highly regarded that they pay me well. I have an assistant here, a growing number of patients, and doctors who believe in what I can do. Now, without so much as a by-your-leave, you announce — not suggest — that we’ll move to San Francisco. What do you say to that, Mr. I’ll-Try-Very-Hard?”
Christian looked alarmed; though his and Kate’s relationship was close and she had as good a business mind as he did, he knew it would never have occurred to her to talk to him like that. David had married himself a real termagant, and no mistake. He waited for his son’s explosion.
David scowled and would have snapped at her, but something in her watchful attitude caught his attention. The words like and respect flashed across his brain. “All right,” he said unexpectedly, “you have a point.” He turned to his father. “Papa, would you consider investing in my Pacific shipping company? And as for you,” and he looked steadily at Janice, “here in San Diego I can’t build the kind of ships I need to have, but you’ll find a lot more patients in San Francisco, because there are a lot more people in San Francisco. Come with me, Janice. Please. I’ve got to go and I don’t want to go alone.”
Unexpectedly she laughed, and then as a bewildered Christian turned from one of them to the other, they were both laughing, except for the picnic the first time they had laughed together since they were children. Francis was not forgotten — rather their laughter was a recognition of the possibility of new beginnings after all and a defiance of the death that had taken their only son.
Janice raised her hot buttered rum. “To the Pleiades,” she exclaimed, knowing now that together they could somehow bear their pain. “Long may they shine on the ocean sea!”
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About the Author
Joan Van Every Frost lives with her husband, an aerial photographer, and h
er son in their adobe farmhouse in Mexico. Author of A MASQUE OF CHAMELEONS, she is also the daughter of historian Dale Van Every.