Sarah Pike McGillis was a girl better known for her gumption than her intellect. She examined the draft and asked, “Can these sheets of paper do that?”
“That’s what George Amory told me. He said they were worth somethin’. Might be a lot, might be a little.”
“Well, thank you,” said Sarah. “We appreciate it. Buster will appreciate it, too.”
IN PORTLAND, THE fall tax bills arrived all at once for Mount Morton, the Meek orchard, and the Portland house.
Gilbert wrote checks on all of them and worried that he could not do it again.
He told Mary Beth about his ancestor, Revolutionary War veteran George North Pike, who was hauled off to debtor’s prison because he could not pay his taxes. In time, there had been a farmer’s rebellion, which had led to the new Constitution. If things did not change, he said, there might be another rebellion.
“The country will get by,” Mary Beth told him. “So will we.”
So they traveled regularly to Vermont and tended the old orchard. They sprayed and pruned in spring. They hired French Canadians to help them harvest in fall. Most of the apples went to a farmer’s cooperative, except for the bushels they used to make cider. They made it hard and told no one, because some busybody in Portland, some lawyer who had lost a case to Gilbert, would just love to catch him violating the Volstead Act.
But November of 1932 brought the hope that a man might soon be able to get an honest drink again and better yet, a job.
The old saying was “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” It did not hold true, because Maine went for Hoover, along with Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Most New England states had voted Republican since Lincoln, so they were not about to change because of a Depression. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the rest of the country, however, went for Franklin Roosevelt.
But there was still no money to invest in a ski slope, certainly not for a lawyer who administered estates when estates were shrinking and did real estate work when no one was buying land. So Gilbert did not consider it a lowering of his stature to appear each morning in the courthouse prepared to offer a defense, for short money, to the row of troublemakers and miscreants brought before the magistrate after a night of drunkenness, brawling, or general mischief.
Since the election of Roosevelt and the legalization of 3.2 percent beer, business had been good. It would get even better when Prohibition was repealed altogether.
Gilbert usually found his clients in the hallway outside the courtroom. He would offer his card to some hangover victim and ask if the man could pay a small fee—ten dollars for a pleading to a verdict of ACD, adjournment of proceeding in contemplation of dismissal. Once, such lawyering had been beneath him. But no longer.
So Gilbert was at the courthouse on a chilly April morning in 1933.
The corridors were full of men taken at a fight in a “restaurant” well known for serving legal beer and stronger stuff in the back room.
He stopped in front of a bench and offered his card to a man nursing a shiner.
The man shook his head. “Gilbert Amory … No thanks. I got a lawyer.”
A big guy at the far end of the bench looked up. He was wearing a blue suit and holding a squashed blue hat with a peaked brim. On the crown of the hat was a badge that read CONDUCTOR. He said, “Gilbert Amory?”
“Can I help you, Mr….”
“Ryan. Mike Ryan.” He stood and offered a big paw. “That makes me—”
Gilbert hustled him around the corner and out of earshot of the rest of the bench-sitters before he said, “My nephew … yes.”
A few hours later, they sat over bowls of fish chowder at a waterfront lunch counter. Wagons rattled by outside. Stevedores and fishermen dug their way through the midday specials—meatloaf, pie à la mode, bottomless cups of coffee. On the wall beneath the menu chalkboard was a metal sign in orange, black, and white: a man in a lab coat, holding a bottle and pointing. DRINK MOXIE!
Ryan had been released. Gilbert had not charged a fee.
Ryan had also sobered up, but he still exuded a sweet cloud of alcohol vapor.
Gilbert watched him dig into his chowder and said, “How’s your mother?”
“Gettin’ old.” Mike Ryan turned his big moon face to Gilbert and lowered his voice. “So … did you kill my sister?”
Gilbert sat back as if he had been struck. “That’s absurd.”
“There was talk.”
“The police ask a lot of questions in an investigation.”
“But you were there. On the Cliff Walk, botherin’ her that afternoon. People saw you. And you were in Newport that night, drunk in a hotel. That’s what the cops told my mother.”
“The night clerk vouched for me. Besides, that was fourteen years ago.”
“So … why did your father come to our house a week later, and give my mother somethin’ to buy her off?”
“He gave her something?” said Gilbert.
Mike dropped a fistful of oyster crackers into his chowder. “He called it his most prized possession.”
“The Constitution,” said Gilbert, almost to himself.
“Yeah. That’s what it was.” Mike got back to scooping chowder into his mouth.
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah. She showed it to me once. Had writin’ on it.” Mike picked up the bowl and drained the last of the chowder. “Is it worth money?”
“My father called it his most prized possession, didn’t he?”
Mike drained his coffee, then pulled out a watch as big as a pie plate. “If I show up, they might let me work the two forty-five. I missed the five twenty-five. So my job’s in trouble.”
Gilbert dropped a bill and several coins on the counter. “Do you think your mother would talk to me sometime about the document?”
Mike Ryan was a big man, and when he stood, he didn’t just stand. He loomed. Then he leaned close to Gilbert’s ear. “You wouldn’t help my sister when she asked. Two days after she sent you a telegram, she was dead. Stay away from my mother.”
But Gilbert could not do that. He sent Maureen a telegram that afternoon.
Mike Ryan wrote back, “Stay away from my Mother.”
THE BIG SONG that year was “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
But they weren’t. Not in Millbridge, anyway.
Sarah and Bill McGillis had kept going since they took the mill over in 1927. They had cut production, laid off workers, bought cheaper cotton, and by 1932, they had been able to meet the balloon payment on their loan.
And then the debt cycle had begun again.
They would have turned for help to their board of directors, but the board that might have bailed them out had sold out when Magnus Perkins left.
So Sarah and Bill, the granddaughter of the mill owner and the son of mill workers, had soldiered on alone. And while one was Protestant and the other Catholic, a mixed marriage in the parlance of the Papists, they both had what could only be called blind faith in the mill that so many of their ancestors had loved.
On a cold December night in 1933, they sat in the kitchen of the mansion that Sarah’s great-greatgrandfather had built nearly a century before. Neither of them could have imagined that it had ever looked bleaker.
The radio was playing “A Connecticut Yankee Christmas.” Carols in the Rudy Vallee style.
Little Buster sat on the floor, close by the stove where it was warm, and played with his tin soldiers.
Sarah and Bill studied the books and wondered. Where was the money to buy raw materials? And the money to meet payrolls for a hundred people? And the money to eat?
“We need another loan.” Bill rubbed his big hands together and cracked his knuckles. “I guess we’ll have to gamble the mill to save it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sarah.
“Put the property up as collateral again.”
“What about personal collateral?”
“Darlin’, we don’t have a pot to piss in.”
She leaned ac
ross the table and gave him a kiss. Then she went to the front hall closet and pulled down the long cylindrical map case.
“This belonged to George Amory. They tell me it’s worth a lot of money.”
The following Monday, they appeared at the American Immigrant Bank of Millbridge and asked to see Mr. Chory, the president.
Jack Chory’s grandfather had arrived from Lebanon in 1860, with the name Khouri, and had gone to work in the mill. His father had attended college, anglicized the name, and come back to open a bank in Millbridge. The name of the bank was only natural: a place for immigrants to save their hard-earned dollars and a place to celebrate the country that had taken them in and given them opportunity.
The Chorys might have decorated their bank with images from Ireland, Italy, or the Middle East, the lands from which most of their customers had come. They chose instead portraits of Washington and Lincoln over the teller’s cage, quotes from great Americans above the customer’s table: “A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned,” “The Business of America Is Business,” “We Hold These Truths Self-Evident …,” and a new one, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.”
But the place of honor, behind the president’s desk, was reserved for a large photograph, eighteen inches by thirty-six. It showed the mill with people arrayed in front of it. Men in long frock coats were seated. They were the managers and board of directors. Behind them were the workers—men, women, and children. And dead center was Will Pike, white-haired and rheumy-eyed, staring straight at the camera, as if trying to send his gaze as far into the future as possible.
The legend on the bottom of the frame read: “The Men and Woman of the Mill, 1861.” And printed in the matting above, the words, “This is America. In America we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we solve our problems.”
Mr. Chory, an amiable man with a bald head and a thick black mustache, took pride in pointing out his grandfather: “Two rows behind Mr. Will Pike himself. He was the first Lebanese in the mill.”
That day, Chory pledged that he would do whatever he could to save the mill that had helped his grandfather and so many others in the Blackstone Valley. And when he looked at what they had brought for collateral, this student of American history was more than interested.
Two days later, Chory visited Sarah and Bill in Will Pike’s old house.
His proposal was direct. Instead of lending them fifty thousand dollars against the first draft of the Constitution, he would buy the document outright for forty thousand.
“Buy it?” said Bill McGillis.
“I’m not sure,” said Sarah.
“But consider,” said Mr. Chory. “By selling it, you will not have to meet debt service. We will not be in a position to issue a call note should your business turn down again. I’m offering you control of your fate in exchange for this document.”
“Is it a fair price?” said Bill.
“I’ve had an appraiser look at it,” said Chory. “He feels that it would be in a range of thirty-five to forty-five thousand. So … to me, it looks like a victory all around.”
And it was.
The McGillises kept the mill running.
Jack Chory was able to sink forty thousand dollars into an asset that could be moved or hidden, because his bank was one of thousands in America that was failing.
A few weeks after he bought the Constitution, the 1861 photograph was replaced by a portrait of the first Chory.
A few weeks after that, the state bank examiners appeared at his door.
ON THE DAY that the spring tax bills arrived, Gilbert knew that he did not have the money to meet them. There were not enough drunks in all of Portland to help him, and they had drained the inheritance from Farmer Meek.
So … where was he going to come up with five hundred dollars for his mountain and two hundred dollars for the Meek orchard?
He sat in his parlor on a Sunday afternoon and seethed. He listened to the radio, which was broadcasting from the Bishop System, “New England’s own radio network.”
Bishop. There was a man with foresight, and one who had weathered the present difficulties well. Gilbert had always remembered his talk about radio. Might he also be interested in other investments?
In the kitchen, Mary Beth washed dishes, slowly and steadily, as if it were a task that soothed her and would be done well. She was a methodical woman, not given to extravagance or outsized expectations. If plans failed, she had told him many times, they could retreat to the farm, cut wood, grow apples, milk cows, and survive.
She sensed him behind her and looked up. “No matter what, we’ve been lucky.”
“Lucky? How?”
“We found each other when the time had passed for most people.”
“I’m thinking of selling this house,” he said.
“No. This is your home, and the farm is my home. If you must sell something, sell the mountain. The mountain is just a dream.”
“But it’s the dreams that keep us going,” he said.
“It’s the little things that keep us going,” she said. “Dreams are like mountains. Sometimes, you never reach them, but each day, you do the little things, and in the doing you sometimes get there.”
He kissed her. He loved her wisdom, but he had to see to this dream, and in times when there was no money, he had to come up with better ideas.
SO THE NEXT morning, he went to Boston.
He found his way to Gloucester Place. He climbed the steps of number 9 to the top floor and knocked. He was hoping that Mike would not be home.
Maureen Ryan opened the door. She may have tried not to frown at the sight of him, but every year of her life was etched into her face.
“I need to speak to you,” said Gilbert. “Please.”
Maureen Ryan was almost seventy. Her hair had gone white. She hunched as if there were a weight on her shoulders.
“You have something that I want,” he said, “something that belongs to me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re saying you don’t have it, or that it doesn’t belong to me?”
“I’m not sayin’ nothin’, Mr. Gilbert Amory. I might have it. I might be savin’ it for my son. I might have given it to relatives.”
“Relatives?”
“I’m not sayin’.”
Gilbert tried a little charm. “Maureen, I’m a relative. I’m your half brother.”
She gave a disgusted laugh. “Fat lot of good that ever done me.”
Normally, before a deposition or cross examination, he prepared every question and analyzed every possible answer. He had not expected this witness to be so hostile. So he asked her, “It’s the Constitution? Why did my father give it to you?”
She shrugged. “He felt guilty, I guess. He never spent a minute with me. Maybe he was plannin’ to give it to my daughter because she asked for it. And he wanted me to have it to shut me up. He thought I’d finger you for the murder if he didn’t shut me up.”
“Did he say that?”
“He asked me not to sell the Constitution till you was off the hook, so no one would wonder where I got it.”
Gilbert could not believe this. He had come to browbeat her into giving it back, or perhaps to negotiate a portion of it. It had to be worth thirty thousand dollars. He said, “Do you have a bill of sale? Did you give my father a receipt? Do you have anything proving that he gave it to you and you did not steal it?”
Maureen Ryan stood and slapped Gilbert Amory in the face. “That’s my answer. Everybody knew you were there, chasin’ my daughter along the Cliff Walk.”
He stood. “I did not kill your daughter. And the police knew that.”
“Your father hoped that was true, and he tried to buy my silence with that Constitution thing. I told him he didn’t need to, but he insisted.”
“Why won’t you let me see it? It could make us both a lot of money. It could help you move out of—” He looked around, made a gesture.
“Mr. Gilbert,” she said, “
this may be nothin’ to you, but it’s mine. Now get out.”
Gilbert tried to think of some way to calm her. But he could not, so he stood, went to the door, turned. “I do estate work, Mrs. Ryan. I know the law.”
“I bet you do.”
“If you try to sell that document, or give it away, or do anything to profit from something a confused old man gave you, I’ll sue you on the grounds of undue influence.”
Just then, the downstairs door swung open and a heavy footfall struck the steps.
“Mother of Jesus,” said Maureen. “First you, now Michael. At eleven o’clock in the morning. They must’ve sent him home drunk.”
“Maybe I should go out the back way,” said Gilbert.
“No,” she said. “You’ll go out the way you come in if you’re a gentleman.”
“Gentleman!” boomed Mike Ryan up the stairs. “Is somebody botherin’ my mother?”
Gilbert turned. The door slammed behind him.
“You!” Ryan pivoted round the banister. “I told you not to bother my mother. And here you are—”
Gilbert put up his hands. “I can explain.”
“Bullshit!” Mike Ryan grabbed Gilbert and threw him down the stairs.
GILBERT AMORY DID not stay to argue. He never argued with drunks. And he had learned a long time ago that if he could not go over the top of the mountain, there might be a way to get around it, so by late that afternoon he was in Hartford, Connecticut.
This was a small city with a big reputation. Once one insurance company had thrived here, others had come as if carried on the currents of the Great River. Now it was called the insurance capital of America. So the streets were full of men with small eyes and tired faces, men in three-piece suits and felt hats—homburgs, derbys, and snap-brim fedoras—hurrying for the evening train or the local saloon.
Gilbert went against their flow to the offices of Samuel Bishop’s Hartford Sun.
“I’m afraid Mr. Bishop’s gone home early,” said the receptionist. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“No thanks.” Gilbert had Bishop’s address, so he hired a taxi to take him to Farmington Avenue.
The Lost Constitution Page 48