by John Jakes
Matt had a new passion ideally suited to his talent for making quick freehand drawings. His friend Whistler had taught him how to do etchings by working directly with a needle on a wax-covered copper plate. The process was called drypoint. Matt had purchased an old star-wheel press so he could produce the plates himself, and Gideon now had one print on the wall of his office—a superb study of a London costermonger done with Matt’s usual economy and memorability of line.
Every time Gideon gazed at the print, he wished he and his brother could work on some joint project. Perhaps a volume of Matt’s drawings—published by Kent and Son. The Boston book house over which Gideon had no direct control was barely meeting expenses by reissuing old titles. The volumes were handsomely produced. But as Molly herself said, Dana Hughes was not an especially imaginative editor. Kent and Son needed at least one big success to revitalize it.
All these associated thoughts of Matt whirled through Gideon’s mind as he sipped the Bordeaux and wondered whether his brother might return to see his painting on exhibit. He’d submitted it at Gideon’s urging, and said he had no interest in attending the show in person. Perhaps some way could be found to lure him to Philadelphia.
Recalling the city brought something else to mind. Gideon set his wine goblet aside. “Margaret?”
She glanced up from her untasted food. In the gloom of the April twilight, her sallow jowls looked even more unhealthy than usual.
“What is it?”
“Just a reminder,” he responded gently. “I don’t want you to forget I’ll be going to Philadelphia early in May.”
“Philadelphia?” She shook her head. “You never told me that.”
For an instant he was tempted to snap at her. Instead, he forced patience into his voice.
“I respectfully beg to say I did. More than a month ago. I’m going to do a feature on the opening of the exhibition. Don’t you recall I told you Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil would be there along with President Grant?”
Again she shook her head, her gaze drifting toward the rain-speckled windows. “No, I don’t recall that at all. You never mentioned it.”
He shivered then, genuinely alarmed. Was she only trying to aggravate him? Or was her mind succumbing to the damaging effects of too much alcohol, exactly as her father’s had succumbed years before he died?
“You said nothing about a trip to Philadelphia to me,” she repeated. Then she focused moist brown eyes on his face. “When are you going to take me to the exposition, Gideon? When are we going as a family?”
“Later in the summer, I promise. I can’t say exactly when I’ll get away, but I assure you we’ll go.”
“That’s good to know,” she murmured, glancing away again, her eyes sleepy.
He left the house a few moments later, deeply troubled by her lapse of memory.
iii
The moment Margaret heard Gideon’s carriage depart, she hurried upstairs, her anger mounting with each step she took.
How dared Gideon pretend he’d mentioned a trip to Philadelphia when he hadn’t! It was just another of his attempts to degrade her and make her feel miserable. Well, she had her own weapons in that little game.
Even though she’d taken nothing to drink for nearly two hours, she felt good all at once. Her face lost its puffy, lethargic look. Her eyes grew alert, thoughtful.
Lately she’d become convinced Gideon was humiliating her with another woman. She didn’t know who the creature was, nor did she have any concrete evidence that she existed. But a man his age didn’t practice enforced celibacy without a complaint—or without a reaction.
Well, let him have his slut. So long as he lived, he was never going to put a hand on her naked body again or enter her bedroom, which she always kept locked. Those were only two of several methods she’d devised to punish him for denying her wishes.
iv
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d—”
Scowling, Margaret thrust the door of Eleanor’s bedroom open. At once the imitation basso voice—Eleanor trying to sound like a man—went silent.
Dark-eyed and full-figured, Eleanor turned a startled face toward her mother. Cross-legged on the floor at Eleanor’s feet, Will lifted his chin from his hands. He looked terrified, as if he’d been caught doing something indecent.
Eleanor tried to hide the small leather-bound book behind her. Margaret lunged and snatched it from her hand.
“I have told you a hundred times. You are not to read and quote playscripts in this house!”
Eleanor’s slightly oval eyes flashed back the gaslight. “Mama, I was reciting from Lear. Shakespeare. It’s fine literature—”
“It comes from the immoral and godless theater, and I won’t have any part of that under my roof. Now get to your French. I want to see your exercises the moment you finish them.”
While she yelled, Will huddled against the end of Eleanor’s bed, as if seeking protection from the shrill voice. Eleanor bit back a retort.
Margaret brushed at a loose strand of hair and said more quietly, “Now. If we have an understanding about this filthy book, perhaps I can convey a message. I asked your father when he planned to take us to the Philadelphia exhibition.”
Will brightened. Eleanor remained red-cheeked and resentful. Margaret pursed her lips in a pastiche smile.
“He informed me he is going to Philadelphia for the newspaper. Alone. He’ll have no time to take us there as a family.”
Will’s lower lip jutted. He jumped up. “But he said he’d show me the Corliss engine! And Uncle Matt’s picture—”
Eleanor calmed a little. “Yes, I distinctly remember him saying that.”
“Well, he’s changed his mind. You children must realize that your father completely submerges himself in his work. He has no spare time—and no consideration—for any of us. Perhaps I can arrange to take you to Philadelphia. I’ll certainly try.”
She gave them a hug. Eleanor acted unresponsive, Will downright fearful. But Margaret was too pleased with herself to notice.
Carrying the Shakespeare, she started out of the room. Will’s face changed even as she watched. So did Eleanor’s. Her son looked hurt, and her daughter annoyed—though now for quite a different reason. If Margaret’s little strategy had worked, Eleanor would no longer be thinking about the confiscated play, but would be directing all her anger at her father.
Or so Margaret fervently hoped.
v
She went straight along to her bedroom. The thirst was goading her. She unlocked the door and slipped in. The chamber was dark. She kept it that way, the curtains perpetually closed.
She lit one gas fixture, then flung the little playbook into the grate. Filthy thing! It would be burned up on the first cool evening that required a fire. She relocked her door and hurried to the cabinet where she kept the bottles of wine and whiskey. She chose the latter. Poured half a glass, shivering and breathing in a noisy way. She shouldn’t have waited so long. Her nerves felt horribly jangled; her palms itched.
She drank the whiskey straight, accustomed to the raw, hot feeling it produced. In a moment the effect became one of soothing warmth. The shivering subsided. Her breathing slowed.
Blinking, she filled the glass halfway again and carried it to an expensive and capacious rosewood secretary under the dim gas fixture, she reached into the pocket of her skirt for a second key and unlocked the secretary.
Inside, she kept the diary she’d started a few months ago when her need for companionship had nearly driven her berserk. She sat down, placed the whiskey glass in front of her and readied her pen. She thought a moment. Then, with a faint smile, she began to write:
Apr. the 21st. A dark day, much rain. Gideon again cruelly pretended my memory has failed, dear friend—
The term appeared in almost every entry. Margaret had quickly come to think of the diary as a person, an intimate and very real confidante.
But I objected and he left for the evening, his face showing vexation and puzzlement.
Ah, how he delights in hurting me! He is going to attend the opening of the great patriotic exhibition. He says he is to report on it for the paper, but I am sure that is merely a pretext. He will see HER there. God protect me from ever learning who SHE is, for I might be tempted to KILL her—
With slashing strokes, Margaret underlined all three of the words printed in crooked capitals. She was breathing hard again. She took a big swallow of whiskey. Sweat glistened on her forehead.
But no, dear friend, I shall never do anything so lacking in subtlety. I have more delicate ways to attack and punish him for refusing to put me ahead of all others. I asked him whether he would take us to the exposition as a family. He said he would. But after he had gone, I told E. and W. that he had said just the opposite.
Her cheeks had a mottled, mealy look as she hunched over the desk under the feeble light of the gas. She drank again, laughing and clucking softly to herself. Her pen moved faster.
He has turned against me. He no longer feels remorse or pain when he denys my wishes, but he WILL feel pain—
More furious slashes beneath the capitalized word.
—because, before I am done with my various plans, and this account of them to you, my only true friend, I will make both his children loathe his face and despise his name and he will never know why they HATE him so!
Oh, it was so pleasing to write that. She drained the glass, already thirsty for more. It was even more pleasing to put down the final lines of the entry:
I have been at work to that end only a few weeks now. But already I see small signs that I am succeeding. More and more such signs will follow from now on. More and more and MORE.
Chapter X
Free Spirits
i
“—AND MAKE SURE you start back the moment you’ve bought everything. Lower Manhattan isn’t safe any longer. Too many foreigners. Too many Jews.”
“Yes, Mama,” Eleanor called, clutching her hat and hurrying down the rear service stairs to escape the hectoring voice.
The one thing she couldn’t escape was the tyranny of the clock. It was already fifteen past three. She was a quarter of an hour behind the schedule she and Charlie Whittaker had worked out when she found she’d be permitted to go downtown to shop this week.
What if there were delays in traffic? What if Charlie failed to appear at the meeting place, or went on to Fourteenth Street without her? Fifteen minutes could cost her everything.
She rushed into the coach yard that opened onto Sixty-first and a vista of weedy vacant lots to the south. It was a gray Saturday afternoon at the end of the week in which Margaret had told the children Gideon couldn’t promise to take them to Philadelphia.
Eleanor’s shoes, yellow-dyed fabric with elastic side panels and a small yellow rosette decorating each, fairly flew over the bricks of the yard. Mills, the coachman, waited on the seat of the calash. He glanced at the sky as Eleanor lifted the hem of her Parisian frock of yellow silk trimmed with ivory lace. In a moment she’d settled herself beneath the folding top of the two-wheeled vehicle.
“Rain looks likely again, Miss Eleanor,” Mills said. “Would you care to have me switch Pete to the brougham?”
“No, no! Let’s be on our way.”
Mills flicked his whip lightly over the horse’s ears. “Giddap, Pete.” The calash swung out of the yard, turned right and then left again into Fifth Avenue, heading south.
Eleanor sat back and tried to breathe slowly and normally. She couldn’t. She was much too excited over the prospect of seeing Salvini—
If she were in time.
Naturally she and Charlie would have preferred to see Edwin Booth. But he and his whole company were doing a grand tour of the South. Salvini was an acceptable substitute, though. In one way he was a better choice because his interpretation of the role of the Moor was thrillingly -wicked—quite unlike Booth’s respectable portrayal.
Anxiously she peered around the coachman for signs of excessive traffic. She so seldom got out of the house by herself on weekends, and she just couldn’t have anything go amiss today. Especially when so many things seemed to be going wrong around home.
Eleanor loved her father. But she was very much aware that lately he’d been paying less and less attention to his family. The neglect had visibly affected her mother. She was shunning all daylight and growing sallow and sickly. And she was drinking to excess—her tonic, she called it. Eleanor knew it was liquor. It caused Margaret to have lapses of memory and periods of almost violent anger directed at Gideon.
Eleanor wished she had the courage to ask her father why he quarreled with her mother so often, or what the children could do to make things smoother. But Gideon was seldom home. And when he was, he was tense and tended to snap in response to even the most casual question. Slowly, and almost against her will, Eleanor was coming to believe that for all her mother’s faults, Margaret might be right about Gideon no longer caring for them.
Was it really his work causing that? Or did he have a female friend? What was the word for it? Oh, yes. Mistress.
She knew what a mistress was because she knew what men and women did together. The girls at Miss Holsham’s discussed it endlessly—which would have made Margaret faint and then withdraw her daughter from that supposedly refined academy.
When men and women removed most or all of their clothing and did that together, and were not married, it was said to be illicit. Somehow her father seemed too nice to be involved in something illicit, but what other explanation could there be for his lack of interest in things at home?
Eleanor had already formed definite opinions about the act itself. She was curious about it. She thought it might be interesting to experience, but she suspected it was dangerous, too. That is, she had a feeling the consequences were dangerous. After all, the act was part of the tangled web-work of actions and emotions which went by the name love. And love, she had concluded, merely got people into dreadful difficulties. She’d read about it time and again, in plays such as the one in which Salvini was appearing. She’d heard even more compelling evidence from behind closed doors in her own house. She’d’ heard quarrels so violent they made her weep.
Of course love in the form of an act performed by two people who cared for one another was evidently necessary to make more people in the world. And there was no denying it provided dramatists with some of their best material. But on a personal level, it seemed to her that love—and, therefore the act of love—merely brought pain. The sort of pain she’d be wise to avoid as she was growing up.
She did realize that might be hard to do. Lately she was full of strange impulses and longings she only half understood. Her body was changing visibly. Right this moment, beneath her dress and her chemise, her growing breasts ached from the bouncing of the calash. And she was full of contradictory feelings. Why, for example, did she sometimes yearn to have a boy touch her, then recoil from it when it happened by accident?
She didn’t understand all the changes within herself, nor all the terrible happenings at home—and together, they made her fiercely afraid of all that was meant by love.
The calash clipped along between the green vistas of Central Park on the right and undeveloped plots of land on the left. Her father believed the city would spread north, and that the Kent mansion would one day be in the heart of the best residential district. It certainly wasn’t now. She read the society columns in the Union and all the competitive papers that came into the house. She knew a man as rich and important as her father should have owned a home in the area the calash was just now entering—Fifth Avenue from the Park down to Washington Square. “Two miles of millionaires,” people called it.
Of course it was possible to have a mansion there and still be called a Shoddyite. That was the case with A. T. Stewart, the owner of the store toward which the calash was heading. Stewart had just died, and everyone said he wa
s worth millions. He owned an immense house at Thirty-fourth and Fifth. But those at the top of society—the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the other old families—looked down on him as a Shoddyite. A man who could not enter the best circles for a generation, perhaps more. Stewart had had the misfortune to have new money, and be “in trade.”
Charlie Whittaker’s father was in trade, too. He sold medicines at wholesale and made plenty of money. But the Whittakers were still Shoddyites. So were the Kents.
Eleanor didn’t care, though. In the shining world to which she aspired, such false and arrogant distinctions were of no importance. The theater was not only a beautiful place, but a democratic one.
It was the blight of Eleanor Kent’s life that, during her nearly fourteen years, she’d only been permitted inside a playhouse once. Her father had taken her to Booth’s, down on Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, in celebration of her tenth birthday. That was in 1872, when they were still living in Yorkville.
Even that long ago, Eleanor’s mother had spoken out against the theater. Margaret claimed that attractions today were nothing like the wholesome ones she’d enjoyed as a girl in Richmond. The New York playhouses had become the province of Satan. In the last decade, a veritable flood of immorality had been undammed within them. The actress Adah Isaacs Menken had dared to appear in Mazeppa clad only in a Greek chiton and, beneath, all but invisible flesh-colored tights. Niblo’s had booked an extravaganza with interpolated songs, The Black Crook, in which a chorus of young women wearing black tights displayed their calves and thighs—to packed houses.
But on Eleanor’s birthday four years ago, the play at Booth’s had been both a thundering hit and eminently respectable. It was Julius Caesar, with spectacular scenic effects representing not drab Julian Rome, but the more colorful Augustan period. The famed actor-manager Edwin Booth played several different parts during the run of the show. When Gideon took Eleanor to see him, he was playing Marc Antony.