Huntington had to restrain himself from crumpling the document in his fist. Forty-five thousand. And a codicil.
Not even mentioned in the will proper. Ella and Tilden II not mentioned at all, not even a provision for the continuance of their present income.
Do not challenge it, he says. You'll get nothing, he says. We'll see about that. No probate court in the world would uphold such a will. Huntington checked his wristwatch: 4:15 a.m. He was not likely to be disturbed. Huntington set out a note pad and began reading the will more carefully. He would get to the other documents soon enough.
Tilden's will made no direct reference to Jonathan being his son. This omission was deliberate and out of sensitivity to Margaret's concern about Jonathan learning from strangers that he was an illegitimate child. But it did not take Huntington long to begin to suspect the truth. Next in the portfolio were photographs of the woman, some quite old and worn, as if they'd been handled often, and several of a man who had to be this Jonathan. He was the image of Tilden Beckwith. Tilden's bastard. Huntington stared long and hard at that face, and as he did a part of him knew that what he had long suspected was true. He, Huntington Beckwith, was not Tilden's son. It would explain much. It would explain why there was so little resemblance. Why they were so little alike in all ways. Why the old man had had so little regard for him all his life and why he was effectively disinheriting him at the end of it.
Whose son was he, then? And what of these dates? Birth dates. And what of the coincidence of his mother's death so soon after his birth? Let's see. That was March when she died. March of 1888. And here is this Jonathan born in December of the same year. So he must have been conceived almost immediately after Mother's death. Clearly, a relationship existed between Tilden and Charlotte at the time of his, Huntington’s birth. What happened to Mother? Did she learn about that relationship and confront him? Did she rush distraught into the night only to be killed by that storm? A most convenient storm for Tilden, it seems. No. More likely it was he who did the confronting—about the birth of a child who looked so little like him. And very possibly, though it could never be proved, Tilden was the cause of Mother's death. And for that he would be punished. For that, and for all the cold looks, all the perfunctory greetings, all the distant schools, all the insults. Tilden would be punished.
Letters. Notarized and witnessed by Andrew Smithberg. Jonathan Corbin is hereby acknowledged to be...et cetera, et cetera... the only true son and heir of Tilden Beck-with... born 25 December 1888 in Greenwich, Connecticut, to the woman then and subsequently known as Charlotte Whitney Corbin ... now residing Evanston, Illinois ... her address. Then and subsequently known ... Peculiar language.
Affidavits. Ansel Carling. Who was Ansel Carling? Ohhh, damn. Oh, God damn it to hell.
It was all there. Three affidavits. One by a man, another by a woman named Hastings—Hastings?—who attested to hearing Ansel Carling boast that he had fathered Ella Beckwith's child. The third by Tilden himself, in his own hand. It amounted to a diary of the events of 1888. He could not, Tilden had realized, be this child's father. His travels to London the year before had ruled out that possibility. The human gestation period of nine months seemed to come as a revelation to him sometime in March of 1888. He did confront her. She ran from him. Toward this Carling person. The next paragraph was very nearly a confession of murder. The one after that confessed an assault upon this Carling, in unnecessary but prideful detail, Huntington thought, down at the old Hoffman House. Carling dead later that same year ... Texas ... his death possibly arranged by Jay Gould “before I could get my own hands on him one more time.” Then several clippings attached and what seemed to be a handwritten biography, a hand not Tilden’s, of Ansel Carling,,formerly Asa Koenig. A Jew? A former convict? A confidence man?
It was too much. He and his daughter, and young Tillie as well, were being stripped of everything. There would be no money, no lineage, no position. A Jew! Jews are people they tell jokes about and keep out of clubs. His own clubs. They would have nothing. Only humiliation if this became known.
“Be calm,” Ella told him. ‘These papers. Are they originals or copies?”
“All copies. And the will is legal enough, but I can find no evidence that it's been filed.”
“If you ask me, I think it's because this Jonathan Corbin has never been told. You notice the relationship is never specified in the language of the will. That might end up saving our bacon.”
”A Jew.”
“What?”
”I am the son of a Jew.”
“Oh, don't be a fool, Father. We're talking about millions here. Do you know a reliable detective?’'
”I suppose.”
“Do you or don't you?”
“There's a man we've used named Bigelow. I thought he was very efficient, but Tilden said we are no longer to use him because he was discharged from the Chicago Police Force on corruption charges.”
“Chicago, you say?”
“He keeps a furnished room in New York as well.”
“Retain him, Father. I want him to try to trace Charlotte Corbin all the way back to her first involvement with Tilden. Who is she? Where did she come from? Why the ‘then and subsequently known’ language? What is there in her past that we can use as leverage?”
“Wait. I'm writing this down.”
“Father.”
“Yes?”
“Just tell Mr. Bigelow to come see me, please.”
Bigelow's report raised as many questions as it answered. It took him only a week to compile a basic biography on Charlotte Whitney Corbin, which worked backward from Chicago to Greenwich to Wilkes-Barre. But he could find no real evidence of her existence prior to the train wreck that supposedly killed her husband. Bigelow went to the New York Public Library, which had several illustrated books on the subject of rail disasters. All of them told about Mud Run. The author of the latest and most detailed book lived in New York City. Bigelow called on him and offered him a hundred dollars if he could find anything in his source material about a Charlotte Whitney or a Charlotte Whitney Corbin. The author, an obsessive little man whose apartment was littered with railroad furnishings and memorabilia, called back the next day. The only Corbin, he said, was a fatality named Hiram who was new to town and certainly not married. There was no other Corbin connected with that train wreck or even mentioned in the Wilkes-Barre census. Yes, he was sure of it. He listed all the sources he'd checked in the hope that Bigelow would still pay him the hundred dollars.
If the name Charlotte Corbin was fictitious, and Bigelow felt sure it was, someone had gone to considerable trouble to conceal her true identity. It struck him that she seemed to have left Greenwich rather suddenly at about the same time several retired whores were being run out of town. Maybe there was something there, maybe not. Nor could he make anything at all out of the name Margaret, with which Mrs. Corbin had signed several of the letters found in Tilden Beckwith’ s safe. Chances are it was Charlotte's real name but it dead-ended right there.
“You don't really have much except bluff,” he told Ella Beckwith. ”I have this notion, it won't go away, that Charlotte might have been a hooker once named Margaret. You could try laying that on him and watch his face. You'll get a pretty good idea if it's true or not. Even if it isn't true, you got a woman out there in Chicago who's made a pretty good name for herself, and who has a son who's a college professor and a grandson just getting out of Notre Dame, but whose whole life has been this big lie. Ask me, that's not such bad leverage.”
“How are you at burglary, Mr. Bigelow?”
”I worked five years in Safe and Loft.”
“Charlotte Corbin has some papers I want. One is the original of Tilden Beckwith’s will. Then there are certain affidavits, correspondence, and the like.”
“The fee's a grand for trying it, three grand if I deliver the goods. If they turn out to be in a bank vault someplace, I don't want to come up empty.”
“How expensive is arson
?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you find these papers, I want you to burn her house down behind you.”
Tilden flew almost directly to Evanston as soon as he heard the news. He used his influence to hitch a ride aboard a DC-3 flying into the naval air station in nearby Skokie. Jonathan met him at the hangar with a limousine and driver, which Tilden had arranged by telephone. It was three days before Christmas. They drove past the tidy affluent homes of Winnetka, most of them decorated with lights and cutout Santas. Many had service stars hanging in their windows and war bond stickers on their doors.
“How is your mother holding up?” Tilden asked gently:
“She's pretty depressed. All her scrapbooks, letters, all the gifts we've given her over the years. It's just gone. I shouldn't tell you, but she made you a cardigan sweater and a quilted smoking jacket for Christmas. They're gone, too.”
“Jonathan?”
“Yes, Uncle Tilden.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jonathan.”
“We're starting over?”
“Jonathan, I am not going to leave here this time until your mother marries me.”
“No kidding.”
“What do you think about that?”
”I think it's great. What kept you?”
“She did,,actually. I did in the beginning. Then she did. The whole business has been very—”
“Dumb?”
”I was about to say complex. There have been other considerations. I... your mother and I...are going to have to have a long talk with you, Jonathan.”
“Neat. Is this where I find out I'm really your son?”
Tilden choked.
“And have been all the time?”
”Uh, that is more or less the case, yes.”
“Uncle—” Jonathan stopped himself. “Would Dad be all right?”
”Ahh ... Dad would be ... ahhh ... perhaps we'd better wait and decide with your mother.”
“How about Tilden as an intermediate step?”
Tilden nodded his thankful agreement. “I'm afraid your mother is going to be very cross with me for blurting this out as I have.”
“Could I ask you something?”
“Certainly. Yes. You may indeed.”
“I've been looking in mirrors for a long time. Do you think I haven't noticed that there's something very familiar about me?”
”I have been told there's a resemblance. There is. Yes.”
“Is it possible that... I know there are probably many good reasons ... but is it possible you and Mother haven't married because you couldn't figure out how to break it to me and Whitney?”
“It's been a factor. No denying it, Jonathan.”
“You do know that I love Mother very much. And that I love you, and admire you and respect you, and that I think you're an absolute gas?”
“That's very kind of you indeed ... son.”
“Then you won't mind my saying that I think you've both been a couple of prize jerks.”
They were married three days later. On Christmas Day. On Tilden’s eighty-third birthday. On Jonathan Corbin's fifty-fifth birthday. They honeymooned at the little inn on the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where they'd gone so many times. Tilden signed the register as he always had, Mr. & Mrs. Tilden Beckwith. His new bride took the pen from his hand and crossed out what he had written. She wrote, in its place, Tilden and Margaret Barrie Beckwith.
“Margaret,” he said as tears came to his eyes.
“Tilden?” She stepped closer to him.
“Yes, my dearest.”
”I don't suppose you know a place where we can swim naked this time of year.”
Three short weeks later, Margaret and Jonathan saw Tilden off for New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. He would need a month at most, he'd told her, to convene the directors, announce his retirement,, set up an orderly transition, and then come back forever. Jonathan had made it clear that he had no interest whatever in trying to learn, at his age, how to run the company. But yes, as majority-stockholder-to-be, he would attend all directors' meetings to see that the company continued to be managed with a sense of responsibility to its past, its place in the community, and its employees. Perhaps Whitney will want to share the task once this war in Europe is over, and if he doesn't try for a baseball career. And don't worry about Mother. The furnished apartment she's renting will be fine until you get back. Either Lucy or I will see her every day. And don't worry, Margaret told him, about those papers and your will. They don't really matter anymore, do they. Hurry back, Tilden. But not too fast. I need time to knit you a new cardigan.
It was late on a cold afternoon when Tilden, still beaming, walked into the offices of Beckwith & Company. His grin changed to puzzlement when he realized that the offices were empty. Perhaps there was snow in the forecast. Perhaps the staff had been sent home early. There was a light inside his office. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should go out again and call the police. But then he thought he heard Huntington's voice coming from inside. Huntington? What was Huntington doing inside his office? Tilden stripped off his hat and coat and laid them across his secretary's unattended desk. “No, stay there, Tillie,” he heard Huntington say. “Stay right where you are.” Tilden pushed open the door.
Huntington was facing him as he entered. He was standing, arms folded, in front of Tilden's desk as if he'd just been sitting on the edge of it. Behind him, in Tilden's chair and looking, as usual, as if he'd been caught at something, was Huntington’s son. Ella, the daughter, sat erect and forward on a leather tufted chair to the left of the desk. She wore a full-length dark coat and a fedora-style hat. Her hands were folded over the knob of the walking stick she affected. And she, as usual, for all her slender build, managed to look a good deal more manly than her brother, whom Tilden was going to swipe out of that chair in about three seconds. To Tilden's right, almost out of his field of vision, stood Chester Wax, nervous, his eyes getting moist, snapping shut a briefcase and murmuring something about excusing himself. A thickset man seated near Wax completed the tableau. He was rising slowly, stretching, indicating to Huntington that he would be outside if needed. Tilden thought he knew that one. Was he not the detective whose further employment he had forbidden?
“It's time we had a family conference,” Huntington said as Tilden heard the door click shut behind him.
“Is it really?” Using just his eyes and the tip of a pointing index finger, Tilden raised Huntington’s draft-dodger son from his chair and deposited him near a small fireplace behind his silent sister's chair.
“Twenty-one right,” Huntington said to him, “seven left, nine right past seven, fifteen left.” Smiling, he gestured toward the cabinet that concealed Tilden's safe. “We know everything.”
“You are referring, I assume, to the stipulations of my will and to the circumstances of your birth.” Now Tilden used his eyes to hold Huntington in place.
”I am. Among other things.”
“You've just lost your job, Huntington.”
“In fact, I no longer want it. I've decided I would prefer to be a full partner.”
“And you are about to tell me why the son of a man named Ansel Carling should lay claim to that.”
The smile stayed frozen. ”I take pride in having his blood, by the way. He was a bold and daring man, much like myself.”
Tilden gagged, then held a hand to his mouth until he was sure he would not laugh aloud. “I could name several things that are wrong with that sentence, Huntington. But I'll simply point out that you've made one anti-Semitic remark too many in your mean little life for me to take you altogether seriously.”
“Get on with this,” he heard Ella's voice. She had not moved.
Huntington Beckwith straightened. ”I told you that we know everything. We have all your papers and we've learned a good deal more. You are quite right that the three of us would prefer not to have our ancestry go
ssiped about for the rest of our lives, but we are resolved that that is nothing compared to what else is at stake here. The real questions, Tilden Beckwith, are these. Does the noble and respected head of Beckwith and Company wish to be known and forever remembered as a man who probably murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy?”
Tilden only shook his head wearily.
“Do you want it known”—Huntington's voice rose a notch—“that you gave your name to a convict's child and pretended he was your own only to divert suspicion, treating that child most bitterly in the process?”
Tilden’s eyes flickered. The last part was true. And he knew there was shame in it. It was all that had made him keep Huntington in his employ and provide an allowance to the others this long. It was all that kept him now from taking Huntington by the collar and throwing him out the door, age difference or no.
“Do you want it known that the noble and blameless Tilden Beckwith was a hypocrite who sired a bastard child of his own and supported that child all his life and yet would not give that child the Beckwith name? Even more, do you want the why of it known?”
Tilden took a step forward. “The why of it, sir?’'
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