Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  ”O'Gorman?” Tilden blinked. “O'Gorman acted for me?”

  ”I don't know the man. John said you'd understand if I reminded you that you left O'Gorman with his pride.”

  Tilden remembered. / never took all a man had. .. I never shamed him ... That O`Gorman's a bad one, but you left him proud. Ansel Carling 's a bad one, but you left him nothin', lad. Nothin’ but gettin' even. Tilden pushed Carling out of his mind, but he made a mental note that he'd have to give Billy O'Gorman another crack one of these days. He owed him that. “Where is John, by the way?” he asked. “I've tried several times to reach him.”

  “He's gone back upstate with John L. Sullivan. Chopping trees and running mountain roads. It seems he's taken up the mission of keeping Sullivan out of saloons and pastry shops so he's fit to defend his title against Jake Kilrain next summer.”

  Tilden shook his head doubtfully. “He'll need every week he's got from the look of Sullivan last time I saw him.”

  Roosevelt's expression said that while the subject interested him, his mind was on more troubling matters..''Back to this chap O'Gorman, Tilden. There is a thing I'd like to ask you.”

  “Ask.” Tilden waited.

  “His report to John Flood was that when Colonel Mann was in fear of blindness or worse, Mann whimpered some tale about having given you some valuable evidence on Jay Gould's man, Carling. The implication was that it is sufficiently damning that you might blackmail Gould with it.”

  “”It might have been if I had chosen to use it. I did not so choose.”

  “Not even to protect your friend? To say nothing of what I hear Gould is doing to your business accounts?”

  Tilden straightened. “My friend has a name, Teddy. I hope you will be pleased to meet her one day.”

  “One day soon, I hope. No offense meant, Tilden.”

  “As for the business, we are holding our own. We've lost the accounts of a few timid men, but I will not win them back at the cost of becoming a blackmailer.”

  “Even at the cost of failing in your father's trust?”

  “Honor is my father's trust.”

  “And yet you paid for the information.”

  “My intention was and is,” Tilden said slowly, clearly annoyed that his friend would doubt his course, “precisely what yours would have been. I intended to take Carling by the scruff of the neck when next I found him, whisper in his ear the things I know, and suggest that Australia might be a more suitable address for him.”

  “Will you tell me what it is you know?” Roosevelt asked.

  “It is a private matter.”

  “Hah!” Roosevelt grinned suddenly and hugely. “It is as I'd hoped. Now it's time for me to confess that I've been meddling in your affairs. I've been to see Morgan about you. He wants you in his office tomorrow at ten.”

  Tilden stared uncomprehendingly. He knew who Morgan was, of course. There was only one Morgan.

  “What could he want with me?”

  “He wants to help you. I knew of some of the losses you'd suffered, and when I mentioned them to Morgan the man snorted and said he'd replace that pittance before lunch.”

  Tilden shook his head. “Teddy”—he searched for words—”I may be slow on the uptake... I am his competitor. It's true that Beckwith and Company is a mere gnat against the House of Pierpont Morgan, but all the same, why would he possibly want to assist me?”

  “He likes you.”

  “Nonsense. J. P. Morgan doesn't like anyone. The man has looked at me exactly three times in my life. The first time he scowled, the second he grunted, the third he nodded.’

  “You see?” Roosevelt said brightly. “He's been warming up to you. For Pierpont Morgan, a grunt is the. equal of a soliloquy.”

  Tilden sat on the edge of his desk and folded his arms. “Teddy, do you or do you not intend revealing why Morgan would be interested in me?”

  “He hates Gould, of course. Despises the man. To sweeten matters even further, he also believes he's been cheated by Ansel Carling who once sold him a leaf from an illuminated Bible. It was supposed to be a rare Septuagint, I think, and it turned out to be a sixteenth-century copy.”

  Tilden felt a weight in his stomach. He knew that Carling had a small collection of illuminated manuscripts. Ella had pointed it out as evidence that some men of business were more cultivated than others. Knowing Carling, Tilden thought the entire collection was probably made up of copies or fakes, yet was adequate to its purpose of creating the illusion of both piety and culture, plus an occasional sale to the unwary. Still, Tilden remained doubtful.

  “That seems a poor reason,” he said. “The whole of Europe has been cheating Morgan and half the other

  moneyed men in America for the past ten years, Gould included.”

  “Naturally.” Roosevelt clapped his hands. “The combination of unlimited funds, unlimited pretensions, and profound ignorance of art has served to tidy up many a French or Dutch attic. Morgan, however, is no fool. He knows that the value of a work of art is what someone else will pay for it, and he knows there are many who'll pay handsomely for a piece that was once in the Morgan collection. There are many forms of cheating, you see. But being cheated by a dealer and being bested by Gould or one of Gould's people are not the same thing. Go see him, Tilden. It is a rare opportunity.”

  “Ten o'clock, you say? Tomorrow?”

  “At Twenty-three Wall Street. He says he plans to take a walk with you.”

  “Your father is well?” John Pierpont Morgan did not otherwise greet Tilden, nor look up from his desk, as an assistant in a swallowtail coat ushered Tilden into the great man's office. Tilden made a conscious effort, as Teddy had warned, not to let his eyes rest upon Morgan's veined and swollen nose.

  “Quiet well, sir. Improving.”

  Morgan was sifting through a pile of correspondence, lingering, it seemed, no more than five seconds on a given page, then either making a note across the top or dismissing some earnest proposal with a contemptuous sweep of his pen. Tilden glanced around the office, waiting. It was smaller than he would have imagined, and crowded. A few more items and it would have resembled an auction gallery. There was not a square foot of wall space left uncovered by a painting or tapestry, most having religious themes. Tiny miniatures set in little jeweled frames competed at a disadvantage against gaudy church ornaments. A built-in bookcase fairly bulged with faded manuscripts, which seemed insignificant alongside gilded special editions in red and brown leather. Yet among those cracked and shabby manuscripts, Teddy had said, were almost the complete original works of Sir Walter Scott and many of the poems of Keats and Lord Byron. Byron's poem “The Corsair” hung framed in glass beneath a photograph of Morgan's yacht, which bore the same name.

  “You are a yachtsman?” He still had not looked up.

  ”I own a small launch at the moment,” Tilden told him, “but I enjoy racing under sail. And an occasional pleasure cruise.”

  “‘Corsair is steam, not sail.”

  ”I know, sir.”

  “You prefer sail?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  ”I don't.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I sit down?”

  “We're not staying.”

  Tilden examined the ceiling. He knew better than to be offended by Morgan's curtness. The man's reputation was that he had almost no capacity for polite conversation and none at all for a democratic view of his fellow man. He considered people, including women, according to function and their level of competence. He was a compulsive, self-driven man, quite aware that he stood supreme among men of business and that he wielded more power than many a head of state. Here was a man to whom more than one United States president had come as supplicant, who lent money to his nation's treasury, and who attached strict conditions to its use. Here was also a man who had been known to throw food or clothing at servants who failed to anticipate his wishes and to likewise throw ledgers at the heads of his executives when he thought their decisions shortsighted, but who would be a
stonished to learn that either took offense. They were there to serve his needs and that was that.

  “Buy a boat,” he said.

  ”I beg your pardon?”

  “Sail it. You'll live longer. ‘The gods do not...' ” Morgan cocked his head. What was the rest of it? ” The gods do not subtract...’ ” He drummed his knuckles impatiently, then jabbed a finger in the air toward Tilden.

  ” ‘The gods do not subtract-from a man's allotted span the time he spends in boats.’ ''

  “Just so. Yes.” Morgan nodded. It may have been a trick of the light but Tilden thought he almost saw a smile. “Let's take our walk.”

  Morgan rose from his desk and strolled past Tilden. A door opened by some unseen signal, and the clerk in the cutaway appeared with a topcoat, which Morgan stepped into without breaking stride. A gesture of Morgan's right hand told Tilden he was to follow close upon that side. He did so through a series of other doors that were held open for them and onto Wall Street, where they turned left up the hill toward Trinity Church. Tilden had not a clue where they were going, if anywhere, or what was to transpire in the course of this constitutional. One question, at least, was answered within a hundred paces when, at a tilt of Morgan's head, the doors of the New York Stock Exchange were opened for them by two armed guards.

  The floor of the exchange was in its customary chaos. A full two hundred voices, one of which should normally be that of Tilden Beckwith, shouted their calls one against the other with each quote that appeared upon an enormous chalkboard. The sound hushed noticeably upon J. P. Morgan's entrance. Tilden felt a hand on his shoulder. Morgan's hand. And with it Morgan urged him forward, across the widest portion of the floor, past men he knew in business, powerful men, men of influence, some of them builders and doers whom Tilden admired, too many of them predators and tearers-down, all of them, to a man, eager adherents to Spencer's law of survival of the fittest, a most convenient theory which allowed them to believe that exploiting the other fellow was nature's way, and an imperative that rendered fair play as superfluous as it was in the forests and the seas. Still, some were more cynically rapacious than others, and Tilden found himself wanting to break away from Morgan long enough to slap a smirking face or two in a small knot of Jay Gould's people. But Morgan held fast and, anyway, what he thought was a smirk now looked more like consternation. At the far end of the floor near where the House of Morgan had its seat, Pierpont Morgan stopped and turned to face Tilden.

  “Good day, sir.” He offered his hand. “Buy that boat.”

  ”Uh, thank you, Mr. Morgan.” Tilden took the hand in utter bafflement. Morgan's free hand loudly slapped Tilden's upper arm as if in a gesture of filial affection. Morgan leaned closer.

  ”I vacation three months the year on mine,” he said quietly. “For years I took no holidays at all. I have learned that although I can do a year's work in nine months, 1 cannot do a year's work in twelve months. Take your holidays, young man. You will be all the richer for them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When you leave, leave smartly. See that there's a hop in your step and a light in your eye.”

  Tilden did his best though he felt like an idiot. The hairs on his neck were hot from all the eyes that he knew were upon them. His step slowed once he reached the street. He wandered in a daze all the way back to his office, where he sat for an hour, undisturbed at his request, puzzling over the morning's odd events. Mr. Scoggins knocked and entered.

  “Mr. Roosevelt is on the telephone, sir. He is quite insistent.”

  “Very well, Mr. Scoggins.'' Tilden rose. He probably should have called Teddy straightaway.

  “And there are some other matters that need your attention. All quite pleasant matters, I think.”

  Tilden was too distracted to question this last. He followed Mr. Scoggins through the outer office, where the level of activity seemed unusually frenetic for this hour, and into the mail room, where he took the earpiece from a waiting clerk.

  “Yes? Can you hear me?” He covered his other ear against the sound of telegraph keys.

  ”I just heard from him, Tilden. It went splendidly. Bully for you, sir,” the voice crackled.

  “Just heard from whom? What went splendidly?”

  “Morgan. He said you had a good long talk about art, literature, sail versus steam, and the proper admixture of work and play. And on his advice you're going to purchase a boat, I understand.”

  Tilden paused, touching his fingertips to his temples. “Teddy, I'm afraid one of us has gone quite mad. Art and literature?”

  “Did you have your talk or not?”

  “Well yes, but not for a fraction of the time you seem to think. And my glancing around Morgan's office and reading the title of a framed poem hardly constitutes a discussion of art and literature.”

  “To Morgan it does. You must have looked appreciative. And in any case you've certainly advanced beyond the nodding and grunting stage. What about your walk through the exchange? I’d give anything to have witnessed that.”

  “Witnessed what, for heaven's sake?” Tilden shouted. ' ‘The man walked me through as if I were a little boy being shown where his father works, and then he as much as patted me on the cheek and told me to skip along home.”

  “How can you be so dense, Tilden? Can you be unaware that you've just been knighted?”

  Tilden closed his eyes. Of course. The flurry of activity in his outer office. Pierpont Morgan choosing the most visible spot on the entire exchange floor to stop, to shake his hand, to give for the world to see the appearance of affectionate advice.

  “Why, Teddy? Why did he do it?”

  ”I told you. He likes you. He also respects your father.”

  “And?”

  “And he is also a man of gargantuan conceits. The suggestion was made that such is his power that a mere handshake, properly witnessed, was the equivalent of his handing a man a million-dollar letter of credit. The suggestion was made that a pat on the arm by J. Pierpont Morgan has greater weight in the financial community than all the schemes of all the Jay Goulds put together.”

  “You are a shameless man, Teddy.”

  “Thoroughly.”

  ”A manipulator.”

  “To a fault.”

  “You should run for mayor again. Your plots deserve a larger stage than the New York State Legislature.”

  “Perhaps I'll get Morgan to shake my hand as well one day.”

  It was going to be fine, Corbin thought dreamily. He could have protected her. Just as he had friends, such good friends, who protected him. Nat... John ... Ted. Especially Ted. “You never met Teddy, did you?” he asked.

  Gwen was at the window, her back to him, watching the first flakes of snow and wishing her uncle would hurry. “Teddy?” She turned. “Teddy Roosevelt?” “Yes.” He was staring at nothing, a wistful near smile on his face. Ive ...” What to say? “I've never had that pleasure.”

  “You should have it. I should see to it. But you never go into the city any more, do you.” It sounded, to Gwen, more an observation than a question. An odd observation. Wouldn't Tilden know? And wouldn't he know whether Margaret had met Roosevelt? Maybe he wasn't talking to Margaret.

  “Hardly ever... no.”

  “Perhaps we'll get him out here next summer for a day's sail. He's quite a good helmsman, you know. One wouldn't expect it the way he jerks about at all other times, but he has a very soft and steady touch on the tiller.” He turned to her, his face lighting up as if he'd just recalled an anecdote, but his expression suddenly clouded and his lips moved soundlessly.

  “Tilden?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is something wrong, Tilden?”

  “Don't...” He waved a hand. “Don't do that. It's me.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Wait a moment. It's who?”

  “It's okay. It's me. Jonathan.” He stood up and stretched, then bent and touched his toes several times to get his blood flowing. ”I was only daydreaming.”
/>   “Was I Laura Hemmings just then?’'

  ”I guess so.”

  “Why not Margaret?”

  “It's no big deal, sweetheart!” He shrugged. “This used to be Laura's house, that's all.”

  There was more to it than that, he knew. He wasn't sure how often Tilden visited Laura by himself, but it seemed like a lot of times over a long period. It was a way of being close to Margaret. Why not Margaret? Gwen had asked. Because Margaret was gone. And Tilden was very sad. And so, as a matter of fact, was he.

  “Honey,” he said, “I'm going to take a little walk by myself.” If he stayed, Gwen would keep asking questions about Laura. And there were, things about her that were no one else's business.

  “It's starting to snow, Jonathan.”

  He looked past her through the window. He felt nothing. Not fear, not even relief that he felt no fear. “You know what?’' He followed the course of a few single flakes. “I think it's gone.”

  Gwen understood at once. She could see it.”No sweaty palms? No ghosts?”

  Corbin shook his head. He could see in his mind all the scenes, the people, the fading or materializing places he had seen before, but they no longer frightened him. They'd become part of him. Like memories. He could think of the woman running from him in the storm, but now he knew who she was and that scene held no terror for him. Only a dim anger that she could not manage to stay dead and forgotten.