Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  “Margaret's love?”

  ' 'I made a change or two. The fact remains, I would not live without you, Margaret.”

  “Nor I without you, Tilden, my bent-nosed gladiator.”

  “Who knows perfectly well when he's being buttered up. What do you hope to extort from me?”

  “It would lighten my heart if you would soften yours toward Ella's child.”

  “Already done. He will have a place in my business because he's studied for it and there seems to be no help for it. He also plans to marry soon. All things considered, I cannot decently deny him a situation.”

  Margaret seemed pleased though startled by the news. “This is already decided? That you'll take him in?”

  “It was done three months ago. He'll have his chance to earn a partnership and possibly even my esteem, although it's a long way from my ledgers to my affections. I'm afraid, though, that his chosen wife will make it doubly hard for him. She's another of those cat people. Stares silently all the time. They doubtless spend their evenings hunting mice together.”

  Tilden assured Margaret that young Huntington would be treated fairly and even receive some consideration in Tilden's will. But she, Margaret, and their son, Jonathan, would be the major beneficiaries. He would also hold her to her promise that Jonathan would one day be told that Tilden was his father.

  “The young man is not a dunce, you know.” This conversation took place several years before Jonathan married Barbara. “All his life he's been hearing people remark on how closely he and I resemble each other. I bet he's just too polite to bring it up.”

  ”I know.” She looked away.

  “Then why don't we tell him together and get it over with?”

  Margaret sighed. “It would mean admitting that I've lied to him all his life. I've had to tell him that Wilkes-Barre train-wreck story. Then, of course, it's also on my official WCTU biography, one result of which is that it's also turned up in nearly every other piece that's been written about me. Talk about tangled webs.”

  “Telling Jonathan and telling the whole world are not the same thing.”

  “Let's wait a while, Tilden. Please.”

  Huntington Beckwith did marry his cat-woman wife and quickly produced two children. The first was a daughter, whom he named Ella to Tilden's unspoken displeasure. The second was a son, whom he named Tilden Beckwith II to Tilden's even greater annoyance. Tilden had refused to consider himself a grandfather until Barbara and Jonathan produced Whitney.

  When Huntington entered the business, although Tilden silently begrudged him the place he'd like Jonathan to have taken, he could not deny that Huntington was resourceful and industrious. The Great War, like all wars, brought good business to those who were far from the battlefields. Beckwith & Company expanded as never before. Where the firm's real estate subsidiary had previously been a builder or improver of property, under Huntington’s management its emphasis shifted more toward speculation. Real estate speculation could certainly be profitable under boom conditions but still, Tilden found it distasteful. It smacked too much of money changing and profiteering as opposed to adding value to a thing and helping it grow. Nonetheless, he gave Huntington his head because the profits allowed him to buy a fine old hotel he'd long had his eye on, the Regency, plus a once-elegant brownstone house on Thirty-sixth Street just off Fifth Avenue, which he gave to the city on condition that it be used as a hospice for homeless young girls. He enjoyed thinking that Georgiana Hastings would be pleased, wherever she was.

  The 1920s were one long sporting event for Tilden Beckwith. Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, and his divided loyalties between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants all vied with Margaret for his attention. Whatever time was left, after an additional deduction to watch young Whitney grow, went to the affairs of Beckwith & Company. When the twenties ended with Wall Street's collapse, heralding the sad gray years of the Great Depression, Tilden was forced to pay more attention to his affairs. Though his losses were considerable in terms of reduced market value, they were not catastrophic. Cyrus Field's disaster had taught him the folly of buying on a ten percent margin. Huntington Beckwith, however, had not had the advantage of that lesson. Many of his land speculations, especially those made on his own initiative, turned largely to dust. It would take another war to restore their value to the prices he had paid. It became a point of honor with Tilden that no employee be laid off or have to take a reduction in salary or suffer in any way at all because of the folly of their management. Tilden punished himself for his own neglect by cutting his salary in half for the first five years of the new decade. Huntington resisted a similar reduction until Tilden informed him of the alternative.

  By the second half of that decade, the firm's fortunes had recovered their full vigor. The rest of the world, Tilden noted ruefully, could not say the same. He smelled war. Just as armed robbery is an inevitable condition as men tire of being poor when a neighbor is not, armed conflict is the same result among nations. He watched newsreel films of that strutting little Hitler fellow in Germany. Half the men behind him seemed to look like Huntington. The other half, discounting the fat one, Goring, looked like Huntington’s son.

  In the year 1937, Tilden Beckwith II entered Yale for all of three months. He was most often called Tillie for short, other variations being Silly or Dilly. These nicknames were a great relief for Tilden, who wanted as little room for confusion as possible between himself and Huntington’s son. After Tillie failed out of Yale, Huntington approached Tilden with a request that he use his influence to get Tillie accepted by Harvard. Tilden was aghast. The thought of Tillie Beckwith walking halls once trod by Teddy Roosevelt seemed an insult to Teddy's memory. It was bad enough that the daughter, Ella, was at Radcliffe and within hissing distance of Harvard. Tilden suggested Boston College. That way, he thought to himself, they could be let out together at night. Cat people!

  Whitney Corbin, meanwhile, set about breaking many of his father's records at New Trier High School and, in 1938, announced his intention of attending Notre Dame University. It was best, he thought, not to play baseball at Northwestern under his father. Besides, Notre Dame had a better boxing program—his grandfather's influence—was more demanding academically, and had many more advantages once you overlooked the fact that the place was overrun with Catholics. Whitney also had a private dream of playing football under Frank Leahy and passing into that school's book of legends. Sadly, however, he did not survive the final cut in either his freshman or sophomore year. But by his third year he was a baseball star and he'd won his first intercollegiate boxing title. He gave no more thought to football. Only to baseball, to boxing, to his studies, and to those wonderful vapor trails made by high-flying airplanes when the weather is right.

  Tilden's friends seemed to die in clusters. In June of 1943, he received a letter postmarked Los Angeles, California, from a legal firm. Under a one-line cover note from a faceless lawyer, there was a typewritten letter on scented stationery. It read:

  Dearest Tilden:

  If you are reading this, I was more ill than I'd hoped. I am ninety years old. I can scarcely believe it but I'm afraid you would if you could see what's become of my fine Spencerian handwriting. Thank God for typewriters.

  I have been out here in Hollywood since 1922, living quite as respectably as this mad little town permits. I was invited here by one of the studio heads who thought his actresses needed instruction in how to behave like great ladies or stars or top-flight whores and was wise enough to know that the three do not differ in their fundamentals. They have paid me outrageous amounts of money and I don 't even have to give half of it to the local constabulary. If only I'd known.

  A friend has told me what you've done with a certain address on 36th Street in New York. I love you for that, Tilden. I also love you for what you have been to a certain lady of our mutual acquaintance. I want you both to know that you have always been in my thoughts. Perhaps, from time to time, you 'll find r
oom for me in yours. Bon chance ...

  Georgiana

  In a postscript, she listed the names of several very well-known actresses under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Instead of sending flowers, she said, go to the movies and watch one or two of these ladies. You'll see and hear more than a little bit of Georgiana Hastings.

  Tilden resolved to do that, but he sent flowers anyway after calling the lawyer for the name of the cemetery where Georgiana rested. On the following Sunday, he was sitting in his box at the Polo Grounds, not really watching the game but gazing dreamily out toward the left field bleachers, where there was once only an open field and a place for carriages to park and picnic. An acquaintance, a man near his own age, stopped to say hello. As he was about to move on he paused, then said to Tilden that he was sorry to read about John Flood. “Oh ... I'm sorry, Tilden. I thought you knew.” It had been a very small item in the New York Daily Mirror, which Tilden seldom read, bare-knuckler dies was the headline. Like Georgiana, he had passed away three weeks earlier. In Saratoga, New York. A heart attack while watching a new young heavyweight train.

  On the Monday after that, having made a note to call a writer he knew at the New York Times to see if he could arrange a more fitting obituary, Tilden returned to his office and learned that Andrew Smithberg, who had joined the firm as a very new lawyer and had been active in it for almost sixty years, the last twenty as executive vice president and chief counsel, had suffered a fatal stroke the evening before. Late that same morning, Tilden wandered sadly into Andrew Smithberg’s office and found Huntington browsing through Andrew's files as another of the firm's lawyers, Chester Wax, stood uncomfortably by.

  “What are you doing there?” he asked quietly.

  Huntington's head snapped up a bit too quickly. “Just seeing what's where,” he answered. ‘‘The business must go on after all.”

  The open file drawer began to resemble a coffin and Huntington a graveyard ghoul feeding on its contents. Tilden blinked the image away.

  “The business will go on perfectly well after a decent interval of mourning. Would you both leave this office, please, and do not return until invited.”

  ”I meant no disrespect, sir.” Wax stepped forward. “On the contrary, there are personal papers belonging to Mr. Smithberg

  that I'll need to help his family make the proper arrangements.”

  “They would be in the safe, Mr. Wax.” Tilden's tone softened. ”I will sort them out and deliver what you need to your desk.”

  Left alone in the office, Tilden stood for a while, his eyes drifting over the many mementos of the past six decades. Eighty-one. It was impossible to believe that he was eighty-one years old. And that Margaret was what? Seventy-seven? That's ridiculous. The woman is no more than thirty-five. Never mind that Jonathan is well into his fifties. An irrelevancy. Perhaps Margaret is thirty-nine. Whatever she is, she still can turn a head when we're walking together, can't she. There is a proudness to her, a grace, that no amount of time can wither.

  Tilden, at last, stepped to Andrew Smithberg’s safe and, lowering himself to one knee, worked the combination. He found two folders, both marked Personal, one bearing Smithberg’s name and the other his own. Margaret's papers. Copies of the originals, rather. We'll hope that she keeps hers secure, not that she seems to intend ever using them. He took a quick look through the folder to assure himself that all was intact, then slid them into his pocket. The safe in his own office would probably be a better place for them now. Next he sorted through Andrew's papers— birth and baptismal record, his will, that sort of thing. These he would deliver to Mr. Wax.

  Tilden spun the dial one more time and swung the safe door shut. Its sound masked another door that was quietly closing behind him.

  Huntington Beckwith stepped softly down the corridor to the office of Chester Wax, who, five years before, had been detected by Huntington diverting relatively minor amounts of cash from the company accounts. Realizing that a cooperative attorney in the hand was worth two disbarred lawyers in prison, Huntington reached an ongoing understanding with him.

  ”I want to see that will,” he whispered. “The will, and whatever else is in that folder. It's probably going into his own safe.”

  “But I don't have that combination either,” Wax told him.

  ”I want to see that folder.” Cat's eyes.

  “Does Mr. Beckwith have another attorney?” the lawyer asked.

  “He's only used Smithberg.”

  “Then why don't we wait just a while? He'll probably ask me to handle some routine affair before long.”

  Huntington nodded. ' ‘Don't wait. Make yourself useful to him. Win his confidence.” He turned to walk out, then stopped. “There is a way that you look at me, Mr. Wax, whenever I leave a room or my back is turned. Make sure Tilden Beckwith sees it.”

  Chester Wax was right. And so was Huntington. Only a few days passed before Tilden began to notice a polite but definite cautiousness on the lawyer's part in virtually any matter that concerned Huntington. Wax seemed neither to like nor trust him. In that particular at least, he was very much like Andrew Smithberg. He was taking up several of Andrew's more urgent duties without needing to be asked, and he was assisting in the ordering of Andrew's estate with apparent sensitivity. By the end of the second week, Tilden was assigning certain of his personal affairs to Chester Wax. Within the month, Wax had seen Tilden open his safe a half dozen times or more. He was almost sure he had the combination memorized.

  A day came soon after when Chester Wax was called into the Board Room to sit in on that portion of a directors' meeting

  that concerned the disposition of Smithberg’s shares in the firm. Huntington offered to buy them at a figure well below

  their true value. Tilden ignored the offer, then announced that he himself would buy them at a premium. Wax, Tilden noticed,

  seemed to give a silent cheer. Wax lingered until all the directors save Tilden had filed out. Tilden now saw a look of concern

  on Wax's face.

  “You have something on your mind, Chester?” Tilden asked.

  “It's really none of my business, sir.”

  “Try me. I assume it concerns the company.”

  “It's just that Mr. Smithberg's passing was so sudden, sir. It has led to some worried water-cooler talk about what might happen to the company if Tilden Beckwith was to...be incapacitated.”

  “If I kick the bucket, you mean.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There is an order of succession. Each of the directors has a sealed envelope outlining my wishes. It amounts to a posthumous proxy vote.”

  Wax's concern appeared to deepen. “But by then, sir, your legal heir will be the majority stockholder. Your instructions will carry no weight if Mr. Hunt—if your heir chooses to ignore them.” The lawyer's slip was deliberate.

  “You presume a great deal, Chester. Mr. Huntington is a salaried executive. Nothing more. That has been made clear to him at least annually for the past thirty years.”

  “He said that?” Huntington's sallow skin was stretched even tighter across his face. “He actually said that I am not named?”

  “He implied it very strongly.”

  ”I must see his will. You must get into that safe.”

  ”I believe I know the combination.” Chester Wax looked smug.

  “You know the—” Huntington's black pupils opened wide. “Well then, write it down for me.”

  “I'll take five thousand dollars for it. Cash.”

  “What you'll get is a jail cell if you're not careful.”

  “It's now six thousand. Cash.”

  “Six thousand, you say?” The voice came back over Huntington's private line.

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  “Wax handles a few trust accounts, does he not?”

  “Yes. The only sizable one is Tilden's endowment for that hospice of his.”

  “Can you get at the funds?”

  “There is a way, yes.”<
br />
  “Get the six thousand there, if you can. The more Wax is compromised, the better. But waste no time on this. Even if you must beg or borrow the money, get into that safe before this week is out. Do you understand me?”

  ”I understand you, Ella. And kindly reserve that tone for your brother.”

  Corbin.

  Mrs. Charlotte Whitney Corbin. Huntington stared disbelievingly at the name.

  He knew who she was. He'd known for almost a quarter century. He'd seen her with him at the service for Theodore Roosevelt. She was that Chicago woman he was·forever traveling to visit. That she might receive some consideration, some remembrance, would not have surprised him. But his heir? To almost everything? Cash accounts, real estate, insurance policies, personal mementos ... everything. To Charlotte Corbin and to Jonathan T Corbin, who appears to be her son, and who is named as executor of the estate with absolute discretion over the affairs and the disposition of Beckwith & Company. Huntington turned to a number of codicils that had been added over a period of years. Another Corbin. Whitney. And somebody named Lucy Stone Turtle. Lesser bequests but still quite substantial. And here. Huntington Beckwith. Huntington Beckwith is to receive an income of $45,000 per year for ten years, whether or not he remains active in the affairs of the firm. If Huntington Beckwith should challenge this will, that bequest is to be withdrawn from him and added to the endowment fund for Hastings House.