The woman’s superstitious tendencies were immediately aroused. ‘He has been given to us by God,’ she exclaimed. ‘See His mark upon him.’
The man thrust the child angrily at her. ‘You’re a fool, woman. The child was given to its mother by a man with bad blood.’ He spat into the fire, the more forcefully to express his opinion of the child’s parentage. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t bet a potato on the little bastard surviving another night.’
Jasio Koskiewicz cared even less than a potato whether or not the child survived. He was not by nature a callous man, but the boy was not his, and one more mouth to feed would only add to his problems. But it was not for him to question the Almighty, and with no more thought of the child, he fell into a deep sleep.
As the days came and went, even Jasio Koskiewicz began to believe that the child might survive, and had he been a betting man, would have lost a potato. His eldest son Franck, the hunter, made the child a cot out of some wood he had collected from the Baron’s forest. Florentyna cut little pieces off her old dresses and sewed them together into multi-coloured baby clothes. They would have called him Harlequin if they had known what the word meant. In truth, naming him caused more disagreement in the household than anything had for months; only the father had no opinion to offer. Finally, they agreed on Wladek.
The following Sunday, in the chapel on the Baron’s great estate, the child was christened Wladek Koskiewicz, the mother thanked God for sparing his life, and the father resigned himself to having another mouth to feed.
That evening there followed a small feast to celebrate the christening, augmented by the gift of a goose from the Baron’s estate. They all ate heartily.
From that day on, Florentyna learned to divide by nine.
4
ANNE KANE had slept peacefully through the night. After a light breakfast, her son William was brought to her private room in the arms of a nurse. She couldn’t wait to hold him again.
‘Good morning, Mrs Kane,’ the white-uniformed nurse said briskly, ‘it’s time to give baby his breakfast.’
Anne sat up, painfully aware of her swollen breasts. The nurse guided the two novices through the procedure. Anne, aware that to appear embarrassed would be considered unmaternal, gazed fixedly into William’s blue eyes, bluer even than his father’s. She smiled contentedly. At twenty-one, she was not aware of needing anything. Born a Cabot, she had married into a branch of the Lowell family, and had now delivered a son to carry on the tradition summarized so succinctly in the card sent to her by Millie Preston, her old school friend:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Anne spent half an hour talking to William, but obtained little response. Matron then whisked him off in the same efficient manner by which he had arrived. Anne nobly resisted the fruit and candy that had come from friends and well-wishers, as she was determined to get back into all her dresses in time for the summer season, and resume her rightful place in the pages of the fashionable magazines. Had not the Prince de Garonne declared her to be the only beautiful object in Boston? Her long golden hair, fine delicate features and slim figure had excited admiration in cities she had never even visited. Anne checked in the mirror, and was pleased with what she saw: people would hardly believe that she was the mother of a bouncing boy. Thank God it’s a boy, she thought, understanding for the first time how Anne Boleyn must have felt.
She enjoyed a light lunch before preparing herself for the visitors who would appear at regular intervals throughout the afternoon. Those who visited her during the first few days would either be family, or from the very best families in Boston; others would be told she was not yet ready to receive them. But as Boston was the one city in America where everyone knew their place to the finest degree, there were unlikely to be any unexpected intruders.
The room she occupied could easily have taken another five beds had it not been filled with flowers. A casual passerby might have been forgiven for mistaking it for a minor horticultural show, if it were not for the presence of the young mother sitting upright in the bed. Anne switched on the electric light, still a novelty in Boston; her husband had waited for the Cabots to have them fitted, which Boston then considered to be an oracular sign that electromagnetic induction was socially acceptable.
Anne’s first visitor was her mother-in-law, Mrs Thomas Lowell Kane, the head of the family following the premature death of her husband. In elegant late middle-age, Mrs Kane had perfected the technique of sweeping into a room to her own total satisfaction, and to its occupants’ undoubted discomfiture. She wore a long silk dress which made it impossible to view her ankles; the only man who had seen them was now dead. She had always been slim. In her opinion - often stated - an overweight woman meant bad food and inferior breeding. She was now the oldest Lowell alive; the oldest Kane, too, come to that. She therefore expected, and was expected, to be the first to arrive on any significant occasion. After all, had it not been she who had arranged the first meeting between Anne and Richard?
Love was of little consequence to Mrs Kane. Wealth, position and prestige she understood. Love was all very well, but it rarely proved to be a lasting commodity; the other three undoubtedly were.
She kissed her daughter-in-law approvingly on the forehead. Anne touched a button on the wall, and a quiet buzz could be heard. The noise took Mrs Kane by surprise as she was yet to be convinced that electricity would ever catch on. The nurse reappeared carrying the son and heir. Mrs Kane inspected him, sniffed her approval and then waved the nurse away.
‘Well done, Anne,’ she said, as if her daughter-in-law had won a minor rosette at a regatta. ‘All of us are so very proud of you.’
Anne’s own mother, Mrs Edward Cabot, arrived a few minutes later. She differed from Mrs Kane so little in her appearance that those who observed them from afar tended to get the two ladies muddled up. But to do Mrs Cabot justice, she took considerably more interest in her grandson and her daughter than Mrs Kane had. The inspection moved on to the flowers.
‘How kind of the Jacksons to remember,’ murmured Mrs Cabot, who would have been shocked if they hadn’t.
Mrs Kane made a more cursory inspection. Her eyes skimmed over the delicate blooms before settling on the donors’ cards. She whispered the soothing names to herself: Adamses, Lawrences, Lodges, Higginsons. Neither grandmother commented on the names they didn’t recognize; they were both past the age of wanting to learn of anything or anyone new. They left together, well pleased: an heir had been born, and appeared on first sight to be quite satisfactory. They both considered that their final family obligation had been carried out, albeit vicariously, and that they themselves might now progress to the role of chorus.
They were both wrong.
Anne and Richard’s close friends and relations appeared throughout the afternoon bearing gifts and good wishes, the former of gold or silver, the latter in clipped Brahmin accents.
By the time her husband arrived following the close of business, Anne was exhausted. Richard seemed a little less stiff than usual. He had drunk a glass of champagne at lunch for the first time in his life - old Amos Kerbes had insisted, and with the whole Somerset Club looking on, he could hardly have objected. In his long black frock coat and pinstripe trousers he stood fully six feet one, and his dark hair, parted in the centre, gleamed in the light of the large electric bulb. Few would have guessed his age correctly. Youth had never been that important to him; some wags even suggested that he had been born middle-aged. It didn’t worry him: substance and reputation were the only things that mattered. Once again William Lowell Kane was called for and inspected, as if his father was checking a balance sheet at the end of a banking day. All seemed to be in order. The boy had two legs, two arms, ten fingers, ten toes. Richard could see nothing that might later embarrass him, so William was sent away.
‘I wired the headma
ster of St Paul’s yesterday evening,’ he informed his wife. ‘William has been registered for September 1918.’
Anne didn’t comment; Richard had obviously begun planning William’s future long before he had been born.
‘Well, my dear, I hope you’re fully recovered,’ he said, having only spent the first three days of his life in a hospital.
‘Yes - no - I think so,’ his wife responded timidly, suppressing any emotion she thought might displease him. He kissed her gently on the cheek and left without another word. Roberts drove him back to the Red House, their family home on Louisburg Square. With a new baby plus his nurse to add to the existing staff, there would now be nine mouths to feed. Richard did not give the matter a second thought.
William Lowell Kane received the church’s blessing at the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of St Paul’s, in the presence of everyone in Boston who mattered, and a few who didn’t. Bishop William Lawrence officiated, while J. P. Morgan and A. J. Lloyd, bankers of impeccable standing, stood alongside Anne’s school friend Millie Preston as the chosen godparents. His Grace sprinkled the holy water on William’s head, and uttered the words, ‘William Lowell Kane.’ The boy didn’t murmur. He was already learning to accept the Brahmin approach to life. Anne thanked God for the safe birth of her son, while Richard bowed his head - he regarded the Almighty as little more than an external bookkeeper whose function was to record the births and deaths of the Kane family. Still, he thought, perhaps he had better be certain, and have a second boy - like the British royal family, he would then have an heir and a spare. He smiled at his wife, well pleased with her.
5
WLADEK KOSKIEWICZ grew slowly. It soon became apparent to his foster mother that the boy’s health would always be a problem. He caught all the illnesses and diseases that growing children normally catch, and many that most don’t. He then passed them on indiscriminately to the rest of the family.
Helena treated Wladek like one of her own, and vigorously defended him whenever Jasio began to blame the devil, rather than God, for the child’s presence in their tiny cottage. Florentyna also took care of Wladek as if he were her own child. She had loved him from the first moment she set eyes on him, with an intensity that grew from a fear that because no one would ever want to marry her, the penniless daughter of a trapper, she would therefore be childless. Wladek was her child.
The eldest brother, Franck, who had found Wladek on the riverbank, treated him like a plaything. He would never admit that he was fond of the frail infant, as his father had told him children were a woman’s concern. In any case, next January he would be leaving school to start work on the Baron’s estate. The three younger brothers, Stefan, Josef and Jan, showed little interest in Wladek, while the remaining member of the family, Sophia, only six months his senior, was happy enough just to cuddle him. What Helena had not been prepared for was a character and a mind so unlike those of her own children.
No one could fail to notice the physical or intellectual differences. The Koskiewicz children were all tall, heavily set, with red hair and, except for Florentyna, grey eyes. Wladek was short and stocky, with dark hair and intense blue eyes. The Koskiewiczes had no interest in education, and left the village school as soon as age or necessity demanded. Wladek, on the other hand, though he was late to crawl, could speak at eighteen months, read before his third birthday - but was still unable to dress himself - and write coherent sentences at five - but continued to wet his bed. He became the despair of his father and the pride of his mother. His first four years on this earth were memorable mainly because of how many attempts he made through illness to depart from it; he would have succeeded in doing so had it not been for the sustained efforts of Helena and Florentyna. He would run around the little wooden cottage barefoot, usually dressed in his harlequin outfit, a yard or so behind his mother. When Florentyna returned from school he would transfer his allegiance, never leaving her side until she put him to bed. In her division of the food Florentyna often sacrificed half of her own share to Wladek or, if he was sick, the entire portion. Wladek wore the clothes she made for him, sang the songs she taught him and shared with her the few toys and presents she possessed.
Because Florentyna was away at school for most of the day, Wladek wanted to go with her. As soon as he was allowed to, he walked the eighteen-wiorsta path through the woods of moss-covered birches and cypresses to the little school in Slonim, holding firmly on to her hand until they reached its gates.
Unlike his brothers, Wladek enjoyed school from the first bell; for him, it was an escape from the tiny cottage that had until then been his whole world. School also made him painfully aware that the Russians occupied his homeland. He learned that his native Polish was only to be spoken in the privacy of the cottage, and that at school Russian would be the mother tongue. He sensed in the other children a fierce pride in their oppressed language and culture, and he too came to share that same pride.
To his surprise, Wladek found that he was not belittled by Mr Kotowski, the schoolteacher, the way he was at home by his father. Although still the youngest, as he was at home, it was not long before he rose above his classmates in everything other than height. His tiny stature misled his contemporaries into underestimating him: children so often assume biggest is best. By the age of five Wladek was top of his class in every subject except woodwork.
At night, back at the little wooden cottage, while the other children tended the violets that bloomed so fragrantly in their springtime garden, picked berries, chopped wood, hunted rabbits or made clothes, Wladek read and read, until he was reading the unopened books of his eldest brother and then those of his elder sister. It began to dawn slowly on Helena that she had taken on more than she had bargained for when Franck had brought home the little animal in place of three rabbits. Already Wladek was asking questions she could not answer. She knew it wouldn’t be long before she couldn’t cope with him, and she didn’t know what to do about it. But she had an unquestionable belief in destiny, so was not surprised when the decision was taken out of her hands.
The first major turning point in Wladek’s life came one evening in the autumn of 1911. The family had finished their usual supper of beetroot soup and rabbit. Jasio was snoring by the fire and Helena was sewing while the other children were all playing. Wladek was sitting at the feet of his mother, reading, when above the noise of Stefan and Josef squabbling over the possession of some newly painted pine-cones, they heard a loud knock on the door. They all fell silent. A knock was always a surprise to the Koskiewicz family, for visitors at the little cottage were almost unknown.
The whole family looked towards the door apprehensively. As if it had not occurred, they waited for the knock to come a second time. It did - a little louder than the first. Jasio rose sleepily from his chair, walked across to the door and opened it cautiously. When they saw who was standing there, they all leapt up and bowed their heads except Wladek, who stared up at the broad-shouldered, handsome, aristocratic figure draped in his heavy bearskin coat, whose presence had instantly brought fear into the father’s eyes. But the visitor’s cordial smile removed any anxiety, and Jasio quickly stood aside to allow Baron Rosnovski to enter his home. Nobody spoke. The Baron had never visited the cottage before, so they did not know what to do next.
Wladek put down his book, rose, walked up to the stranger and thrust out his hand before his father could stop him.
‘Good evening, sir.’
The Baron shook his hand, and they stared into each other’s eyes. When the Baron released him, Wladek’s eyes came to rest on a magnificent silver band around his wrist, with an inscription on it that he couldn’t quite make out.
‘You must be Wladek.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the boy, seemingly unsurprised to find that the Baron knew his name.
‘It is about you that I have come to see your father,’ said the Baron.
Jasio signified by a wave of his arm that the other children should leave him alone with his master
, so two of them curtsied, four bowed, and all six retreated silently up into the loft. Wladek remained, as no one suggested he should join the other children.
‘Koskiewicz,’ began the Baron, still standing, as no one had offered him a seat, firstly because they were too frightened, and secondly because they assumed he was there to issue a reprimand. ‘I have come to ask a favour.’
‘Anything, sir, anything,’ said the father, wondering what he could possibly give the Baron that he did not already have a hundred-fold.
The Baron continued. ‘My son, Leon, is now six years of age, and is being taught privately at the castle by two tutors, one from Poland, the other from Germany. They tell me he is a bright child but lacks competition, as he has only himself to beat. Mr Kotowski at the village school tells me that Wladek is the only boy there who is capable of providing such competition. I have come to ask you if you would permit your son to leave the village school and join Leon and his tutors at the castle.’
Before Wladek’s eyes there appeared a wondrous vision of books, and teachers far wiser than Mr Kotowski. He glanced towards his mother. She was gazing at the Baron, her face filled with a mixture of wonder and sorrow. His father turned to her, and the moment of silent communication between them seemed an eternity to the child.
The trapper gruffly addressed the Baron’s feet. ‘We would be honoured, sir.’
The Baron turned his attention to Helena.
‘The Blessed Virgin forbids that I should ever stand in my child’s way,’ she said softly, ‘though she alone knows how much I will miss him.’
Kane & Abel (1979) Page 2