“This is our witness tree,” Foster had said in his mock parson’s voice—neither of his listeners dared giggle—“and anyone who stands beneath its leaves has to tell the truth to any question. So help me God.” They had then pricked a spot of blood from one another’s forefingers with the sewing needle Eleanor had stolen from their nanny’s dresser drawer, and mingled the drops. “So help me God,” Eleanor had said, picturing the Higher Power as another Mr. Moxley, the taciturn, bearded counterman at the general store, and secretly rather thrilled at the daring idea of irritating him. Allen had blinked twice, swallowed, then muttered his assent in his trebly voice. “I can’t hear you,” Foster had announced grandly, and Allen had to repeat his oath while Eleanor sucked her trickling fingertip.
Allen turned toward her and opened his mouth, but no sound came, only a sigh. He wouldn’t move, she knew that. He’d sit there, silent as fungus, his head cocked toward the sound of the waves.
“She told me she did it for three cigarettes, on a dare, sounds like to me,” Eleanor said. “I think her father caught you at whatever you were doing and Foster saved your bacon.”
Allen seemed to shrink into himself.
“It was a schoolgirl bet, that’s all, to see if you’d take the bait, Allen. You made a fool of yourself for three cigarettes.”
“Are you going to tell Father?” he said, still feigning interest in the gentle waves slapping against the shore.
“I haven’t told anyone,” she said, sharper now. “I don’t want Foster’s good name tarred with the brush that’s tarred you.”
“Decent of you.”
“I happen to think the family name is worth something,” Eleanor said. “You might think about that too, next time.”
“What next time?” He rolled his eyes, then shifted his gaze to the low, dark clouds on the horizon.
Eleanor blinked behind her glasses. A stray strand of wiry hair, prized loose by the breeze, fell across her face. “Oh, Allen, surely you know yourself better than that. You and I both know there’ll be a next time.”
Allen abruptly stood up and walked down to the water’s edge. He picked up a stone and skipped it off the wave tops.
“I didn’t want to know any of this,” Eleanor continued. “If there’d been no Mo Reavey, maybe right now you’d be sitting over there with Foster and Grandpa, talking perch and politics.” Allen winnowed a handful of stones, chose one, sent it flying. “I know what you want more than anything.”
That caught him. He turned. “What’s that?”
But she was on the move, already making for the trees, her back to the beach and the plinking rocks, wet in his hand. “To be taken seriously,” she called over her shoulder.
“And I know what you want,” Allen said. A wet stone lolled in his palm.
She continued toward the lone birch.
His voice reached her, hoarse and loud. “You want to be pretty. You want boys to look at you the way they look at Mo. You want to have a boy sneak you into the woods and rustle your skirts.” He spun a darting skimmer twenty yards along the wave tops, admiring the result for a lingering moment. Then he came toward her, the soft smile long gone. “You hear me?”
Eleanor held one hand to her chest, a reflex; she found herself clenching her dress tightly in her fist. The first tear trickled free and pooled where her spectacles rested on her cheek.
“You aren’t pretty,” he said very clearly, so she wouldn’t miss a syllable. “And the boys would sooner watch paint dry as look at you. And that will never change.”
She made herself take a step, then another. Move. She left him there. The island melted in her welling eyes, salt on the tip of her tongue, while her brother skipped stones, calm again, beyond penance.
Allen mustn’t see her cry. That was perdition.
Eleanor sleepwalked along the spine of the short ridge, then down into the dunes that faced Canada, the sand leaking into her shoes, her skirts flying up to her waist in the wind. She didn’t care. For some minutes she made herself observe the passing weather, looking for a rhythm to distract herself. Do mothers feel this way about their wayward children? she wondered. She tried counting waves, like sheep; it didn’t work. The dune grass scratched the backs of her calves, like uncut fingernails. She couldn’t help herself: she felt perversely protective of Allen, as if, madly enough, he were incapable of protecting himself. This admission only made her angrier. Allen had little chance of escape—he was trapped in Foster’s wake, a dinghy behind a schooner. So what? she chided herself. His fate, not hers.
She faced no such dilemma, precisely because the world had little to offer her. Elder sister Margaret was the soft, companionable satellite of her mother; younger sister Nataline a spark plug and her father’s favorite, but so far in age from Eleanor they led separate lives. No: to Foster and Allen, the ones who counted, Eleanor was the Little Sister, struck from the family equation when the political futures were assayed. Already her family didn’t give her fair weight. That realization was part of her fiber—Allen’s insults only spurred her on.
She threw her shoulders back, adjusted her spectacles, and set off back over the sands.
She found Allen perched against his favorite boulder. She stood over him, her shadow falling across him, a cape of charcoal gray, though he gave no notice. Eleanor had her hands locked behind her back, her battle posture. Her eyes were dry as stones. Pity I have no mirror to see myself now.
“I have something to say,” she announced—their code phrase before testifying beneath the witnessing birch limbs.
“You don’t know everything,” Eleanor began. They faced each other, each standing within the radius of the birch tree, Eleanor deadpan and defiant, Allen shrugging his shoulders, a young man awkward, not at home in his body.
“The fact is,” Eleanor went on, her voice low and slow, “I saw much more than Foster did. I talked to Mo Reavey last night.”
She let that one sink in. Allen’s eyes flickered for a delicious moment and she knew she had him now.
“That’s right,” Eleanor said. “While Foster was stopping Mack from tearing you limb from limb, I was having a chat with Mo in the bushes. I guess,” she said, ever more slowly, “you’d like to know what we said?”
Allen grunted. He shifted from foot to foot, a man with tight shoes.
“Allen, don’t you ever insult me like you just did,” Eleanor said. “One word, just one, and Father knows everything. I don’t care if Foster gave Mack Reavey a thousand dollars to shut him—”
“Ten dollars,” Allen interrupted, but Eleanor wasn’t to be headed.
“—to shut him up, Father will know exactly what you’ve done on your Thanksgiving break, Mr. Man-about-Princeton. She’s only fifteen.” Eleanor paused before adding quietly, “And her father beats her.”
Allen looked at his sister blankly.
“So do you know what I did, Allen? I made sure Mo Reavey doesn’t go behind her father’s back and ruin us all to spite you. You’re going to have to buy Mo Reavey a box of cigarettes every week to keep her quiet. I’m to deliver them. You owe me a quarter already.” She waited for his reaction, then stuck her hand out for the quarter. There was none. “Any possibility of a child?”
Allen stood there, a steer awaiting the hammer blow between the eyes. He shook his head.
The two of them sat knee to knee on adjoining rocks, Foster and his grandfather-mentor, the low sun in their eyes as they spoke, Foster questioning, Grandpa Foster replying in his cracked Indiana drawl.
“Tough lesson to learn, but in that world, bloodlines, Foster, that’s the ticket.” The old man had a forbidden cigar going, and he squinted down its length through the smoke, pulling at his ancient muttonchops. “Fact is, Foster, you’re a scholarship boy from Watertown, New York.” He drew the blanket round his bony legs. “There’s Harvard and Yale boys’d buy and sell you before breakfast on their daddy’s walking-around money. No, Princeton’s bit of paper and your George Washington law degree mean damn in t
heir eyes. Saw it myself. Without a Harvard law degree, without being shot at pretty good by Johnny Reb, and without a few good friends in town, I’d still be conveying farm mortgages in Indianapolis, Foster. You need all three and you got a hand full of deuces when the social bets are down.” He blew out a satisfying stream of smoke. “The State Department’s full of drones in smart suits, all running after the one or two men who really know which way is up. You want to be the one smart lawyer in a room full of diplomats. You want all the heads around the table looking to you for legal advice. Point?”
Foster nodded. “Point, Grandpa.”
“So you’ll have to crack Wall Street from the inside,” the crafty old patriarch said, lifting his lined face toward the lake breeze. “I can ask around, see who’ll take you on, see what you’re made of. You’ll start at the bottom, but after a few deals and a lot of midnight oil you’ll run rings around the pretty faces at State, Harvard law degree or not. The heart of the matter is business, Foster. Never forget that. Diplomacy is just the way in. But it’s what comes after the diplomats are done that matters: the deal. Putting people in a small goddamn room—excuse my French—get ’em talking, keep ’em talking. Knocking heads, if you have to. Make the deal stick and you’ll never have to litigate. How I made my fortune.”
The old man examined the smoke as it drifted away. “Here’s a prophecy: in ten years Wall Street ought to own Europe the way she owns America now. That means policy, finance, diplomacy, the whole shebang. And the rest of the world won’t be far behind. How old are you, Foster?”
“Twenty-five next February.” At twenty-four, his hair was already starting to thin, Foster reminded himself.
The old man nodded. “On February twenty-fifth, am I right?”
“Good memory, Grandpa.”
“Can’t forget my namesake’s birthday, now, can I?” He licked his lips, dry from the smoke. “Twenty-four? My word, last time I looked up, you were barely in long pants. You know, when I was about your age, Lincoln wasn’t even president. Saw him a couple of times, once in the hottest courtroom I’ve ever been in.” He blinked at the memory. “Summer sittings, up in Danville, just across the Illinois state line. That was a big thing, just to ride the train there in those days. And hot? Hot as Hades. Judge gave Lincoln permission to make his submissions in his shirt sleeves. He won, too. Good lawyer. Good voice—important, that.”
“You’ve been keeping a good Mr. Lincoln story under your hat, Grandpa.”
“Have I? Sorry, Foster. Forget who I’ve told what. Comes of too long in harness, I expect. Lincoln. Raised some money for his Senate run once, from a mill owner up Lafayette way. Twenty bucks, a lot of money in those days. Eighteen fifty-eight. My.” He had a pull from his bourbon flask and offered Foster one too. “Been thinking a lot about your future, Foster, up there in my writing room at the house. Written all the books on diplomacy this world needs. Now I conspire. All by myself.” Foster laughed and his grandfather waited him out. “Well, I’ve been thinking about those railroads.”
“Railroads?” Foster asked.
“Before the railroads there was precious little you’d recognize as business. Banks were small, not the huge affairs of today—the banks came and went like snow some years. Contract and criminal law was about it for lawyers—none of this corporate or international practice like now. No railways, no big banks, no steel. And these immense companies, U.S. Steel, Morgan’s banks, they’re not going to stop just because Teddy Roosevelt decided to kick ’em around with the Sherman Act.”
“Supreme Court’s just busted up Standard Oil,” Foster replied. “Word is American Tobacco’ll be next. I’d say the president’s got the whip hand.”
“That what folks are saying down there on Wall Street? Not on your life. Foster, what’s a man do when he can’t make a go of it in his own backyard?”
“He moves on,” Foster replied.
The waves were crashing louder now, as the afternoon breezes freshened even more.
Grandpa eyed the shoreline, nodding. “That’s right. You watch what these trusts do now.” He licked his dry old lips and stopped to think. “Rockefeller, Carnegie, Du Pont, the meatpackers, the coal and electric men, the oilmen Texas way: those boys didn’t get where they are sitting on their hands. They can taste the money just waiting overseas. Russia. Germany. Everywhere the British aren’t, and a few places they are. You watch where the smart money goes. Germany, Foster, Germany. Steel and coal and the Ruhr. Chemicals—which means they’ll need oil, and oil we’ve got. There’s your future.”
“You’ve rarely steered me wrong, Grandpa.”
“I did have something of a career once, you know, Foster, traveled the world for this country.”
Foster laughed again and his grandfather smiled. They were closer than father and son, the two of them, with a shorthand between them fast as a telegraph.
“Think like a lawyer first but like a businessman second. And keep your eye on the world, not just the next deal down the street. That’s the future, Foster. The future.” He nodded to himself again, suddenly spent.
His grandson took quick measure of the old man, his eyelids shut, pouched, and almost transparent with age. Foster reckoned Grandpa hadn’t much longer. Be some funeral, too: between his law practice and his decades as an ambassador here, there, and everywhere, Grandpa Foster knew most of the influential men on the planet. Foster tugged the blanket around the old man’s knees; he stirred himself with a fragile smile. “Thank you, Foster. They tell me you were dancing with young Helen Taft at the Russian ambassador’s ball last month. Cut quite a figure, the two of you, I heard tell.”
“A lovely young woman, Grandpa. But not for me.”
Grandpa Foster laughed and shook his head. “You’re a brave man. Not every young lawyer would walk away from the daughter of a future chief justice of the Supreme Court, my boy.”
“Thought of that too, Grandpa. Got plans of my own.”
The old man shivered despite the blanket. It was time to go. “I know you do, Foster, I know you do. You need me, just ask. I’ll get something off to Bill Cromwell, fix things up, keep my conspiracy on the boil. Hello, there’s my granddaughter. Ellie!” He waved at Eleanor, his rheumy eyes squinting to hold her in focus. “The old lighthouse still standing?”
“Sure is, Grandpa,” Eleanor replied. “A little more glass gone, but otherwise none the worse for wear.”
“Well, don’t you stand tall, Ellie,” her grandfather observed. “You look like the cat who ate the canary.”
Eleanor smiled at Foster over the top of her grandfather’s head and winked. “Feathers and all, Grandpa,” she said lightly. “Feathers and all. Allie’s just coming, Foster. He said he had some thinking to do.”
A Lake Ontario November dusk, a rustle of bats zigzagging across a streak of turquoise sunset, and the silence of Chekhov’s minute. Twenty minutes past seven and the dull silence of a family replete with holiday fare, struck dumb while the maid cleared under Mrs. Dulles’s not so indulgent gaze; she had a diplomat’s daughter’s sense of protocol.
When they were younger, Eleanor remembered, these moments in her best blouse seemed endless, glacial, but she learnt early on not to fidget. This discipline she now took for granted, like memorizing Scripture and singing in her toneless voice the hymns her father instilled in his children, necessary as air, even in the elastic Dulles version of Presbyterianism. Eleanor had witnessed the occasional battles that took place in her father’s work: a minor virtuoso of the just divorce and the intricacies of Presbyterian politicking, Reverend Dulles preferred the manse library and the kirk session’s back rooms to the diplomatic compromises and passing allegiances that so enthralled his gifted elder son and his distinguished father-in-law.
Foster, then a first-year law student, had accompanied Reverend Dulles, of counsel in the matter of Morrison versus Morrison. Eleanor, freshly sighted with her new spectacles, had watched through the session hall’s wrought iron keyhole. Grown men glowered at on
e another over the fate of Bessie Morrison, mother of two, indigent, and seeking to rid herself of a miserable marriage to the town drunk. Reverend Dulles had won her case for Bessie, against odds, through the sheer spirit of his arguments, as best twelve-year-old Eleanor could glean.
She was not a spiritual girl. She adored her mother with a passion that her father’s distant perfection never roused in her. They all did; she was a puckish woman with her father’s flair, a far cry from the orthodox cleric’s retiring spouse. The Reverend was more kindly uncle than father, welcoming when he remembered to be available, but all too often in Albany or New York on church business or putting out some theological fire at the seminary. He’d never mastered intimacy. There had been arguments, of course, but Eleanor supposed her father’s passions must have matched his love for his wife—there were five children, after all.
Nonetheless, in the backdraft of his wife’s speed and worldly charm, the Reverend seemed always a step behind, a man with dust on his shoulders, not a failure but not quite a success, even in his own eyes. Eleanor was alone in this appraisal: her two sisters, content with their lot, never much entered into discussions that strayed beyond the bounds of family.
The Reverend’s destiny in this company, he and his middle daughter well knew, was a seat below the salt.
Eleanor watched her father now, peering benignly over his glasses at Foster and Grandpa, all of them waiting for the plates to depart before they renewed their debate over that Princetonian hero of the Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, ex-president of Foster and Allen’s college and now governor of New Jersey, was sharing his own Thanksgiving table in Washington with Eleanor’s maternal uncle, the smooth and mobile Bertie Lansing.
The Witness Tree Page 2