Florentyna obeyed, and as her brothers arrived from the loft where they all slept, they kissed their mother’s hands in greeting and stared at the newcomer in awe. All they knew was that this one had not come from Matka’s stomach. Florentyna was too excited to eat her breakfast this morning, so the boys divided her portion among them without a second thought and left their mother’s share on the table. No one noticed, as they went about their daily tasks, that the mother hadn’t eaten anything since the baby’s arrival.
Helena Koskiewicz was pleased that her children had learned so early in life to fend for themselves. They could feed the animals, milk the goats and cows and tend the vegetable garden without her help or prodding. When Jasio returned home in the evening she suddenly realized that she had not prepared supper for him, but that Florentyna had taken the rabbits from Franck, her brother the hunter, and had already started to cook them. Florentyna was proud to be in charge of the evening meal, a responsibility she was entrusted with only when her mother was unwell, and Helena Koskiewicz rarely allowed herself that luxury. The young hunter had brought home four rabbits, and the father six mushrooms and three potatoes: tonight would be a veritable feast.
After dinner, Jasio Koskiewicz sat in his chair by the fire and studied the child properly for the first time. Holding the little baby under the armpits, with his splayed fingers supporting the helpless head, he cast a trapper’s eye over the infant. Wrinkled and toothless, the face was redeemed only by the fine, blue unfocusing eyes. As the man directed his gaze toward the thin body, something immediately attracted his attention. He scowled and rubbed the delicate chest with his thumbs.
“Have you noticed this, Helena?” said the trapper, prodding the baby’s ribs. “The ugly little bastard has only one nipple?”
His wife frowned as she in turn rubbed the skin with her thumb, as though the action would supply the missing organ. Her husband was right: the minute and colorless left nipple was there, but where its mirror image should have appeared on the right-hand side, the shallow breast was completely smooth and uniformly pink.
The woman’s superstitious tendencies were immediately aroused. “He has been given to me by God,” she exclaimed. “See His mark upon him.”
The man thrust the child angrily at her. “You’re a fool, Helena. The child was given to its mother by a man with bad blood.” He spat into the fire, the more precisely to express his opinion of the child’s parentage. “Anyway, I wouldn’t bet a potato on the little bastard’s survival.”
Jasio Koskiewicz cared even less than a potato whether or not the child survived. He was not by nature a callous man, but the boy was not his, and one more mouth to feed could only compound his problems. But if it was so to be, it was not for him to question the Almighty, and with no more thought of the boy, he fell into a deep sleep by the fire.
As the days passed by, even Jasio Koskiewicz began to believe that the child might survive and, had he been a betting man, he would have lost a potato. The eldest son, the hunter, with the help of his younger brothers, made the child a cot out of wood that they had collected from the Baron’s forest. Florentyna made his clothes by cutting little pieces off her own dresses and then sewing them together. They would have called him Harlequin if they had known what it meant. In truth, naming him caused more disagreement in the household than any other single problem had for months; only the father had no opinion to offer. Finally, they agreed on Wladek; the following Sunday, in the chapel on the Baron’s great estate, the child was christened Wladek Koskiewicz, the mother thanking God for sparing his life, the father resigning himself to whatever must be.
That evening there was a small feast to celebrate the christening, augmented by the gift of a goose from the Baron’s estate. They all ate heartily.
From that day on, Florentyna learned to divide by nine.
CHAPTER FOUR
Anne Kane had slept peacefully through the night. When after her breakfast her son William returned in the arms of one of the hospital’s nurses, she could not wait to hold him again.
“Now then, Mrs. Kane,” the white-uniformed nurse said briskly, “shall we give baby his breakfast too?”
She sat Anne, who was abruptly aware of her swollen breasts, up in bed and guided the two novices through the procedure. Anne, conscious that to appear embarrassed would be considered unmaternal, gazed fixedly into William’s blue eyes, bluer even than his father’s, and assimilated her new position, with which it would have been illogical to be other than pleased. At twenty-one, she was not conscious that she lacked anything. Born a Cabot, married into a branch of the Lowell family, and now a firstborn son to carry on the tradition summarized so succinctly in the card sent to her by an old school friend:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Anne spent half an hour talking to William but obtained little response. He was then retired for a sleep in the same efficient manner by which he had arrived. Anne nobly resisted the fruit and candy piled by her bedside. She was determined to get back into all her dresses by the summer season and reassume her rightful place in the fashionable magazines. Had not the Prince de Garonne said that she was the only beautiful object in Boston? Her long golden hair, fine delicate features and slim figure had excited admiration in cities she had never even visited. She checked in the mirror: no telltale lines on her face; people would hardly believe that she was the mother of a bouncing boy. Thank God it is a bouncing boy, thought Anne.
She enjoyed a light lunch and prepared herself for the visitors who would appear during the afternoon, already screened by her private secretary. Those who would be allowed to see her on the first days had to be family or from the very best families; others would be told she was not yet ready to receive them. But as Boston was the last city remaining in America where each knew his place to the finest degree of social prominence, there was unlikely to be any unexpected intruder.
The room that she alone occupied could easily have taken another five beds had it not already been cluttered with flowers. A casual passerby could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a minor horticultural show, had it not been for the presence of the young mother sitting upright in bed. Anne switched on the electric light, still a novelty for her; Richard and she had waited for the Cabots to have them fitted, which all of Boston had interpreted as an oracular sign that electromagnetic induction was from then on socially acceptable.
The first visitor was Anne’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Thomas Lowell Kane, the head of the family since her husband had died. In elegant late middle-age, she had perfected the technique of sweeping into a room to her own total satisfaction and to its occupants’ undoubted discomfiture. She wore a long chemise dress, which made it impossible to view her ankles; the only man who had ever seen her ankles was now dead. She had always been lean. In her opinion, fat women meant bad food and even worse breeding. She was now the oldest Lowell alive, the oldest Kane, come to that. She therefore expected and was expected to be the first to arrive. After all, had it not been she who had arranged the meeting between Anne and Richard? Love had seemed of little consequence to Mrs. Kane. Wealth, position and prestige she could always come to terms with. Love was all very well, but it rarely proved to be a lasting commodity; the other three were. She kissed her daughter-in-law approvingly on the forehead. Anne touched a button on the wall, and a quiet buzz could be heard. The noise took Mrs. Kane by surprise; she had not believed that electricity would ever catch on. The nurse reappeared with the heir. Mrs. Kane inspected him, sniffed her satisfaction and waved him away.
“Well done, Anne,” the old lady said, as if her daughter-in-law had won a minor equestrian prize. “All of us are very proud of you.”
Anne’s own mother, Mrs. Edward Cabot, arrived a few minutes later. She, like Mrs. Kane, had been widowed at an early age and differed so little from her in appearance that those who
observed them only from afar tended to get them muddled up. But to do her justice, she took considerably more interest than Mrs. Kane in her new grandson and in her daughter. The inspection continued to the flowers.
“How kind of the Jacksons to remember,” murmured Mrs. Cabot.
Mrs. Kane adopted a more cursory procedure. Her eyes skimmed over the delicate blooms, then settled on the donors’ cards. She whispered the soothing names to herself: Adamses, Lawrences, Lodges, Higginsons. Neither grandmother commented on the names they didn’t know; they were both past the age of wanting to learn of anything or anyone new. They left together, well pleased: an heir had been born and appeared, on first sight, to be adequate. They both considered that their final family obligation had been successfully, albeit vicariously, performed and that they themselves might now progress to the role of chorus.
They were both wrong.
Anne and Richard’s close friends poured in during the afternoon with gifts and good wishes, the former of gold or silver, the latter in high-pitched Brahmin accents.
When her husband arrived after the close of business, Anne was somewhat overtired. Richard had drunk champagne at lunch for the first time in his life—old Amos Kerbes had insisted and, with the whole Somerset Club looking on, Richard could hardly have refused. He seemed to his wife to be a little less stiff than usual. Solid in his long black frock coat and pinstripe trousers, he stood fully six feet one, his dark hair with its center parting gleaming in the light of the large electric bulb. Few would have guessed his age correctly as only thirty-three: youth had never been important to him; substance was the only thing that mattered. Once again William Lowell Kane was called for and inspected, as if the father were checking the balance at the end of the banking day. All seemed to be in order. The boy had two legs, two arms, ten fingers, ten toes, and Richard could see nothing that might later embarrass him, so William was sent away.
“I wired the headmaster of St. Paul’s last night. William has been admitted for September 1918.”
Anne said nothing, Richard had so obviously started planning William’s career.
“Well, my dear, are you fully recovered today?” he went on to inquire, having never spent a day in the hospital during his thirty-three years.
“Yes—no—I think so,” his wife responded timidly, suppressing a rising tearfulness that she knew would only displease her husband. The answer was not of the sort that Richard could hope to understand. He kissed his wife on the cheek and returned in the hansom carriage to the Red House on Louisburg Square, their family home. With staff, servants, the new baby and his nurse, there would now be nine mouths to feed. Richard did not give the matter a second thought.
William Lowell Kane received the church’s blessing and the names his father had chosen before birth at the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul’s, in the presence of everybody in Boston who mattered and a few who didn’t. Bishop William Lawrence officiated; J. P. Morgan and Alan Lloyd, bankers of impeccable standing, along with Milly Preston, Anne’s closest friend, were the chosen godparents. His Grace sprinkled the holy water on William’s head; the boy didn’t murmur. He was already learning the Brahmin approach to life. Anne thanked God for the safe birth of her son, and Richard thanked God, Whom he regarded as an external bookkeeper whose function was to record the deeds of the Kane family from generation to generation, that he had a son to whom he could leave his fortune. Still, he thought, perhaps he had better be certain and have a second boy. From his kneeling position he glanced sideways at his wife, well pleased with her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wladek Koskiewicz grew slowly. It became apparent to his foster mother that the boy’s health would always be a problem. He caught all the illnesses and diseases that growing children normally catch and many that others don’t, and he passed them on indiscriminately to the rest of the Koskiewicz family. Helena treated him as any of her own brood and always vigorously defended him when Jasio began to blame the devil rather than God for Wladek’s presence in their tiny cottage. Florentyna, on the other hand, took care of Wladek as if he were her own child. She loved him from the first moment she had set eyes on him with an intensity that grew from a fear that because no one would ever want to marry her, the penniless daughter of a trapper, she must therefore be childless. Wladek was her child.
The eldest brother, the hunter, who had found Wladek, treated him like a plaything but was too afraid of his father to admit that he liked the frail infant who was growing into a sturdy toddler. In any case, next January the hunter was to leave school and start work on the Baron’s estate, and children were a woman’s problem, so his father had told him. The three younger brothers, Stefan, Josef and Jan, showed little interest in Wladek, and the remaining member of the family, Sophia, was happy enough just to cuddle him.
What neither parent had been prepared for was a character and mind so different from those of their own children. No one could miss the physical or intellectual difference. The Koskiewiczes were all tall, large-boned, with fair hair and, except for Florentyna, gray eyes. Wladek was short and round, with dark hair and intensely blue eyes. The Koskiewiczes had minimal pretensions to scholarship and were removed from the village school as soon as age or discretion allowed. Wladek, on the other hand, though he was late in walking, spoke at eighteen months. Read at three but was still unable to dress himself. Wrote at five but continued to wet his bed. He became the despair of his father and the pride of his mother. His first four years on this earth were memorable only as a continual physical attempt through illness to try to depart from it, and for the sustained efforts of Helena and Florentyna to ensure that he did not succeed. He ran around the little wooden cottage barefoot, usually dressed in his harlequin outfit, a yard or so behind his mother. When Florentyna returned from school, he would transfer his allegiance, never leaving her side until she put him to bed. In her division of the food by nine, Florentyna often sacrificed half of her own share to Wladek, or if he was ill, the entire portion. Wladek wore the clothes she made for him, sang the songs she taught him and shared with her the few toys and presents she had been given.
Because Florentyna was away at school most of the day, Wladek wanted from a young age to go with her. As soon as he was allowed to (holding firmly on to Florentyna’s hand until they reached the village school) he walked the eighteen wiorsta, some nine miles, through the woods of mosscovered birches and cypresses and the orchards of lime and cherry to Slonim to begin his education.
Wladek liked school from the first day; it was an escape from the tiny cottage that had until then been his whole world. School also confronted him for the first time in life with the savage implications of the Russian occupation of eastern Poland. He learned that his native Polish was to be spoken only in the privacy of the cottage and that while at school, only Russian was to be used. He sensed in the other children around him a fierce pride in the oppressed mother tongue and culture. He, too, felt that same pride. To his surprise, Wladek found that he was not belittled by Mr. Kotowski, his schoolteacher, the way he was at home by his father. Although still the youngest, as at home, it was not long before he rose above all his classmates in everything other than height. His tiny stature misled them into continual underestimation of his real abilities: children always imagine biggest is best. By the age of five Wladek was first in every subject taken by his class.
At night, back at the little wooden cottage, while the other children would tend the violets and poplars that bloomed so fragrantly in their springtime garden, pick berries, chop wood, catch rabbits or make dresses, Wladek read and read, until he was reading the unopened books of his eldest brother and then those of his elder sister. It began to dawn slowly on Helena Koskiewicz that she had taken on more than she had bargained for when the young hunter had brought home the little animal in place of three rabbits; already Wladek was asking questions she could not answer. She knew soon that she would be quite unable to cope and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. She had an unswervin
g belief in destiny and so was not surprised when the decision was taken out of her hands.
One evening in the autumn of 1911 came the first turning point in Wladek’s life. The family had all finished their plain supper of beetroot soup and meatballs, Jasio Koskiewicz was snoring by the fire, Helena was sewing and the other children were playing. Wladek was sitting at the feet of his mother, reading, when above the noise of Stefan and Josef squabbling over the possession of some newly painted pinecones, they heard a loud knock on the door. They all went silent. A knock was always a surprise to the Koskiewicz family, for at the little cottage, eighteen wiorsta from Slonim village and over six from the Baron’s estate, visitors were almost unknown and could be offered only a drink of berry juice and the company of noisy children. The whole family looked toward the door apprehensively. As if it had not happened, they waited for the knock to come again. It did—if anything, a little louder. Jasio rose sleepily from his chair, walked to the door and opened it cautiously. When they saw the man standing there, they all bowed their heads except Wladek, who stared up at the broad, handsome, aristocratic figure in the heavy bearskin coat, whose presence dominated the tiny room and brought fear into the father’s eyes. A cordial smile allayed that fear, and the trapper invited the Baron Rosnovski into his home. Nobody spoke. The Baron had never visited them in the past and no one was sure of what to say.
Wladek put down his book, rose and walked toward the stranger, thrusting out his hand before his father could stop him.
“Good evening, sir,” said Wladek.
The Baron took his hand and they stared into each other’s eyes. As the Baron released him, Wladek’s eyes fell on a magnificent silver band around his wrist with an inscription on it that he could not quite make out.
Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Page 2