by Pamela Pope
It wasn’t as if he knew the man. All he had were vague memories of two brief meetings which had taken place when he was very young, but he vividly remembered his reaction. Max Berman had seemed so incredibly tall, and there had been harsh, bitter words exchanged between his father and mother which had created an atmosphere. Whenever William had read about the devil he had pictured his father. Max had instilled fear in the heart of the small boy, yet he had neither done nor said anything directly to cause it. All his feelings had come about subconsciously through his closeness to Ellie, whom he adored.
That evening he decided the time had come to insist on being told the truth, and to do that he also had to be truthful. He gathered his courage and joined his mother in the conservatory after dinner when he knew she would be alone for a while.
‘William.’ Her face lit up. ‘Am I to have the pleasure of your company?’ She put down the book she’d been reading and patted the chair beside her.
He continued to stand, clearing his throat and wondering whether this had been a good idea after all. He couldn’t bear to upset her, but the matter couldn’t be put off any longer.
‘I’m sorry, Mother, I don’t want to go to Harvard after all,’ he said, gritting his teeth. There was nothing he had ever wanted more.
‘Stop teasing,’ Ellie said. ‘And don’t stand there like a disgruntled giraffe. I can’t talk to you with your head up in the roof.’
He was already as tall as his father and his hair was just as black, but the lightness of his eyes gave him an added handsomeness which guaranteed him the heart of every eligible girl in town. He was so popular it was a wonder he had any time to study, yet his academic progress was phenomenal.
‘I’m serious,’ he told her. A puzzled frown creased her brow as he dropped down heavily into the cane chair. ‘I heard you talking to Grandfather. I won’t be paid for with my father’s money. I’d rather not go.’
Ellie sighed deeply. ‘So that’s it.’
‘I know I shouldn’t have listened.’
‘You know nothing about your father.’
‘Then it’s time I did.’ William faced her. ‘I mean it, Mother. I won’t be fobbed off any longer with the excuse that I’m too young to understand. No one ever talks about him. Why?’
His mother looked down at her hands. Her wedding band was the only ring she wore. ‘I loved him too much,’ she said, quietly. ‘That was the root of the trouble.’
‘Then why did you leave him?’
‘I didn’t. He left us. He abandoned us on the quayside at Southampton and returned to America on the next ship. You were only a few months old and I was deserted in a foreign country with no money, nothing. It was the cruellest thing anyone could do.’
Gradually the story was told. William listened avidly, but couldn’t fully comprehend the tragedy. It was not until she got to the part about his Cousin Galina’s inheritance that his blood began to boil. He remembered Galina as a scraggy kid with carrotty hair who had scratched him, the only time they had met.
‘You’re saying this company in England which belongs to Galina, and which my father runs, was bought with your money!’ he exclaimed. ‘That means it should rightfully be yours.’
‘Not according to English law. Your Uncle Oliver bought shares in it legitimately and when he didn’t leave a will everything he owned went to his daughter.’
‘But you could have contested it. You could have proved the money was yours.’
‘How, William?’ his mother asked. ‘Remember, my father didn’t know my mother had given me the money. I could never have gone through the courts. Think of the humiliation. And who would have believed me?’
He understood that. What he didn’t understand was how she could have continued to accept the situation all these years without doing anything to avenge herself. She had even claimed it was her fault. If that was loving too much he vowed he would never fall into such a trap.
‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘my Cousin Galina is sitting on a fortune which would in time have been mine, and I don’t take kindly to that. She has no right to anything, and my father is a thief.’
Ellie covered his hand with one of hers to stop him when he would have gone on. Even when she spread her long, tapering fingers they scarcely met the edges of his own broad palm.
‘What should or should not be Galina’s is debatable,’ she said. ‘And your father is not dishonest. When he came here back in ninety-eight he returned to me all the money your Uncle Oliver had embezzled, so in effect Galina only inherited the profit Oliver made out of what had been mine. Do you follow?’
William inclined his head. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Which means you can go to Harvard without any qualms because the money to pay for it, and for anything else you may need, has always been mine.’
He needed time to digest the facts. In some ways things were not quite so bad as he had always imagined and he found he could live with the truth more easily than he had anticipated. What galled him was the unfairness of it all, and his mother had every bit of his sympathy. And yet … He thought of the way Ellie had always kept him close and fussed over him. Sometimes, lately, he felt smothered. Was that how his father had felt? Ashamed of his disloyalty, he concentrated on the guilt. If Max Berman hadn’t left them stranded their lives would have been different now, and Galina Devlin would still have been in the Jewish quarter where she belonged.
From that moment, Galina Devlin took equal place with his father in the hatred stakes, and with all the impetuosity of his sixteen years he planned revenge.
‘All right,’ he said to Ellie. ‘I’ll go to University and I’ll be the top student of my faculty. Then, when I’m one of the most powerful men in engineering I’ll put Court Carriages out of business.’
His mother only smiled.
By the time William Berman was due to sit for his degree, a great many things had changed in the world and his priorities were altered. He had far more important matters to think about than a carriage-building company in England.
Ellie became interested in the American National Red Cross soon after 1905 when the second Congressional Charter was granted to it, and she quit Hull House in order to broaden her knowledge of nursing and community work. There was a section of the organisation in Chicago where she could learn about public health, and how to assist victims of natural disaster. She took training in water-safety programmes, and it wasn’t long before she was training others. Elena Berman was a woman of note in Chicago, not for giving lavish parties or trying to outdo the spending of her contemporaries, but for her charitable work. As well as her social studies she had a gift for management, and she took great exception to a remark made by W. I. Thomas in his book Sex and Society, when he said that women were incapable of becoming scholars.
Her activities didn’t meet with the approval of her family.
‘It’s unbecoming,’ Sibylla clucked. ‘Whoever heard of a girl of your class being more interested in the sewage works and the city’s water than a new season’s wardrobe?’
‘Expensive too,’ complained Conrad, though he was rather proud of his unconforming daughter. ‘With your membership fees to this society and various other subscriptions it seems as if you’re paying for the privilege of working. Can’t understand it.’
Ellie took no notice. ‘It’s my money,’ she reminded them. ‘Mr Pullman left me a legacy to spend wisely and that, I hope, is what I’m doing.’
Her godfather’s multi-million dollar estate had not been settled until 1903. Most of his fortune had gone to his family, of which he had often said she was a part, but a very generous amount had been left to Chicago charitable institutions so Ellie knew he would have approved.
Work with the Red Cross kept her increasingly busy over the following years, but Mama insisted on a certain amount of socialising, and without ever intending to, she broke several male hearts. In the summer of 1909 Randolph Sale reappeared in her life, still t
all and thin, and now a barrister of repute. He declared he had never forgotten her.
‘Ellie, I’ve never married because of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve not found anyone to compare, and that’s the truth.’
‘Tosh,’ Ellie replied, teasingly. ‘It’s because no one will have you.’
‘That’s not the case. I’m quite a catch, you know, and plenty of mothers try to interest me in their daughters.’
He was still pompous and conceited, as boring as ever. All the same, she knew her own parents would have approved if he had been her choice. Now, because of her religion, there was no question of re-marriage, and in the case of Randolph she was glad of it.
On the whole she enjoyed her independence. Two years later, in 1911, she went on a tour of Europe with William to broaden his outlook, but England was not on the itinerary, and neither was romance, though there were plenty of gentlemen anxious to persuade her that she needed it to brighten her life.
It was the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 which suddenly made her very aware of Max again. He would be too old for active service, but British civilians were suffering from privation and industrial problems with so many men being mobilised. She hadn’t seen her husband in sixteen years. He would be nearing forty-five now and she wondered if he was ageing well, or whether prosperity had led to dissipation. It ought not to have mattered, but she found herself dwelling on him to the point of sleeplessness some nights, though all correspondence between them had finally ceased and she didn’t even know if he was still in Southampton.
Sometimes Ellie cursed her pride. Long ago Max had given her the opportunity to forgive, and as a good Catholic she ought perhaps to have been generous. Since talking openly with William she had questioned whether that single unpremeditated act of desertion should have resulted in a lifetime’s separation, especially the separation of father and son. Without conscious thought she had poisoned William’s concept of Max. That was a sin for which she asked repeatedly for absolution when she went to Confession.
The European war brought the International Red Cross into prominence, and Ellie attended meetings at the headquarters of the American branch in Washington where she met members of the governing board. Many volunteers were already in France helping the wounded and the French homeless, and she longed to be allowed to join them.
‘Mrs Berman, your enthusiasm for fieldwork is commendable, but you are much more valuable to us here,’ she was told.
She went back to Chicago greatly disappointed, but keener than ever to work for the cause. In 1915 she would be forty, but she seemed to have more energy than she’d had in her youth, and she was never tired.
That year the American people were horrified and alarmed by the torpedoing of the unarmed British ship Lusitania with much loss of life, and it gradually dawned on them that German policy was to dominate the world. The National Security League tried to arouse them to awareness of their own potential danger, but it was clear that the United States was not militarily prepared for active intervention, and the movement gained no encouragement.
The war was already in its third year in February 1917 when President Wilson broke off relations with the German Empire because, amongst other things, it refused to restrict submarine warfare. There was much opposition to the decision.
Jefferson Harvey was one of many pacifists who tried to bring pressure on the government to remain neutral. He organised demonstrations in Chicago, and on the eve of the President’s speech to Congress on 2 April he took part in a march through Washington with other pacifists calling for peace at any price. Their voices went unheard. The President announced: ‘We will not choose the path of submission,’ and on 6 April the United States declared itself to be on the side of the Allies. On the whole those who had voted him into a second term of office agreed that in the interest of national security the move had been necessary, but there was still no enthusiasm for the involvement, and most thought it could have been avoided.
For Ellie it was different. She had been reading everything available about the conflict on the other side of the Atlantic and was glad that something was at last being done to help. The authorised war loan of seven billion dollars was just the beginning. No army had ever been mobilised so quickly, and she suddenly found herself in charge of a team recruiting nurses to serve in military establishments. From that time on she hardly had a spare moment to think of anything else.
It was Drew who shocked her into facing the possibility of William being conscripted. He was then twenty-three and came within the age limit set by the Senate.
‘He’s written to me already,’ Drew said. ‘A Reserve Officers Training Corps has been set up at Harvard under French officers sent by the government, but William wants to volunteer straight away.’
‘He can’t!’ exclaimed Ellie. ‘What about his studies?’
‘Nothing beats the school of life. I came to no harm.’
She couldn’t deny it. Three years ago, Drew had taken over from his father as President of the Union Atlantic, and was now one of the most respected men in the city. But she would not allow William to jeopardise his career.
‘You must stop him being so foolhardy,’ she fretted.
‘Your son’s a man now. My advice is to let him make his own decisions, or you’ll lose him the same way as you lost Max.’
The suggestion staggered her. She had never thought of herself as an over-protective mother, but clearly that was the way Drew saw it, and she trusted his judgement in all things. He was actually laying the blame on her … She ignored it.
‘Why hasn’t William said anything to me?’ she asked. ‘I visited him only a few weeks ago.’
‘I think he was afraid of opposition,’ said Drew, with a wry smile. Then he went on to explain his plans for his nephew. ‘William is a brilliant scholar. He’s going far. Now, the Railway Committee of the Advisory Commission wants nine regiments recruited from the railroad, a thousand men in each, for an expeditionary force in France, and I’ve been asked to supply men. Each regiment will be headed by engineer officers of the Regular Army, but commissions are being given to civil engineers. I can get one for William without any difficulty.’
Ellie went deathly pale. ‘You can’t let him go to France.’ It was unthinkable that her son, her baby, was going to war. ‘I won’t let you do it, Drew. He’ll be in terrible danger.’
‘And so will thousands more. It’s what he wants. Be proud of him! He’s got guts.’
William was headstrong, a trait he had inherited from his mother as she knew only too well, and if he had made up his mind to be among the first American engineers, then that was what he would do if she didn’t intervene. Two days later she took the train to Boston and met up with him.
‘This is madness,’ she protested. ‘Why can’t you wait for officer training at University? The war might be over before you would have to go abroad.’
‘Mother, I wouldn’t miss this for anything,’ William declared. ‘Harvard men have already sailed with a unit of the Medical Corps and I’m green with envy. I want to be involved in the action.’
He had stopped growing at six feet two, and had become broad in the shoulders. She could hardly believe she had produced him, and the mere thought of perhaps losing him was more than she could bear. She tried everything from coaxing to emotional blackmail, but to no avail.
‘I love you so much, my darling. You’re all I’ve got,’ she said finally.
He tucked an arm through hers and took her into a fashionable Boston tearoom where the cakes had become plainer, the portions smaller, and the customers fewer since Mr Hoover, the Food Administrator, had appealed to the people to cut out four o’clock teas. As a nation they were asked to eat less, to have no second helpings, no food at parties and none between meals. Life had changed rapidly in so many ways.
‘Tell me,’ William said, drawing out a chair for her. ‘Is it right that you asked to be sent overseas with the Red Cross?’
Sh
e met his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘And if you get a chance in the future, will you go?’
‘Yes, but that’s different. I’m older than you, You’ve everything to live for.’
‘What crap!’ he exclaimed rudely. Then he took her hands in his. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t worry just the same about you? Mama, I love you too — more than anyone in the world. But I wouldn’t try to stop you doing what you believed in, and I believe in the right to fight for peace. The Germans have got to be beaten and I’ll be there doing my bit, the same as you.’
‘Oh, William,’ Ellie sighed. She had to accept she’d lost out to Drew and the Harvey spirit of adventure.
*
In July, Lieutenant William Berman was drafted overseas with a group of Engineers who were to pioneer the building of piers, docks, and roads ready for an American army of two million men to launch its offensive against the Germans. There were not the facilities in France to handle such a vast number of men and machines, and as the Americans intended to be independent of other armies they would need to build new ports for their ships, warehouses for the food which would have to be brought over, arsenals and foundries for the artillery, towns for salvage work and repairs, and new rail-links between the Atlantic coast and the battlefields which were about 400 miles away.
William went first to England, landing in Liverpool on a day full of sunshine. He stepped off the ship onto English soil and was aware of a feeling of antipathy towards everything British, yet the welcome extended to him and his comrades couldn’t have been warmer or more enthusiastic. Somewhere in this country was the man who had fathered him, then deserted him, but it wasn’t fair to judge a nation simply because it had become Max Berman’s adopted home.