The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  “Uncle Bertie is likely to be Governor Wilson’s secretary of state,” Foster said with his usual dry certainty, seasoning his words in silence before he spoke.

  His mother smiled evenly at her elder son’s aplomb. “Foster, you’d think you had your finger on Washington’s erratic pulse,” she said affectionately. Grandma Foster, a fox-faced, peppery woman in a fine blue dress, glowed at her daughter.

  “It’s all over campus,” Allen offered, then laughed his hollow laugh. “The boys all think Uncle Bertie’s a shoo-in, except Frenchy Kellogg, and he’s never right about anything except slow horses and fast women. Or so they say.” He laughed again. No one joined him.

  Grandpa shrugged, the black shoulders of his dinner jacket rising. “These things are balancing acts, Foster, careful balancing acts,” he said, gently ignoring Allen’s intelligence. “Your Uncle Bertie has solid connections, but what’s really important is that the president has complete faith in his instincts. Bertie’d be the first to admit he and Wilson don’t agree on everything—the Balkan mess for starters.”

  Allen couldn’t keep still, Eleanor saw. He had the jitters as he listened, looking for his opening. Foster, as usual, beat him to the draw.

  “Grandpa, to my mind Wilson’s right. How do you stop a three-way war? Post your own men in a crossfire? The Hapsburg curse, the Balkans. Then there’s oil.”

  Grandpa proffered a diplomat’s well-gauged nod. “Then there’s oil,” he repeated, ruminating on the afternoon’s theme. “The Ottomans are sleeping on their oil and the lumbering Russians drowning in theirs. An interesting situation.” He coughed, and Eleanor knew his habits well enough to know old John Watson Foster had tired, his belly full of Kraków ham and the good local potatoes. “Allen, my boy,” he lobbed across the table, “what’s to be had at Princeton these days for a young divinity student in the making?”

  Allen was surprised to be addressed, and Allen surprised was a moving target. “I’ve been talking to some of the fellows,” he said, “whose fathers did missionary work, and I, ah, think that I’d like to see something of the world.”

  That you haven’t already seen in the smokers you’ve been to in Greenwich Village, Eleanor thought.

  “Planning a broadening voyage, then, before divinity school?” Allen’s father said, the first time he’d raised his voice since the plates had been taken away. The Reverend had spies at Princeton, and the reports on Allen hardly inspired confidence. Eleanor had seen a letter from one of the spies on her father’s desk. The exposed top page featured the first of a half dozen potted biographies of Allen’s companions, beginning with Francis “Frenchy” Kellogg, of the New Orleans Kelloggs, cardsharp, imbiber of strong drink, and a profligate young man given, so the author noted, to “challenging young Mr. Dulles, a scholarship man, to contests involving cigarettes and foreign liquors and oversleeping lectures.” Mr. Kellogg was independently wealthy and Mr. Dulles appeared to be cultivating him for all the wrong reasons. “Allen does fancy a millionaire’s company,” the report concluded.

  “I thought China,” Allen was saying. “They know us there.”

  “What they know is your grandfather,” the Reverend replied crisply. “What they will come to know is you, Allen.”

  “I mean to have a look on my own terms,” Allen muttered, eyes down.

  Grandpa Foster and his bullish namesake had fallen silent.

  “And then?”

  “And then I shall see,” Allen replied stubbornly. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “You haven’t decided for divinity, dear?” his mother asked. If her question was an attempt to defuse things, it failed miserably.

  “I haven’t decided for anything,” Allen said, affecting his most disarming smile, the one that reminded Eleanor of a department store floorwalker she’d seen in Rochester once. He’d tried to edge her toward the change rooms; she’d fled. He never stopped smiling the whole time.

  “When do you plan to decide?” the Reverend pressed on.

  “When I’m ready, Father,” Allen said, his voice a tone lower.

  His father brought his hands together on the waxed tabletop, the gesture of a man used to speaking from behind a pulpit. “You have, I believe, given your word you would pursue the life of the cloth,” the Reverend said carefully.

  Father doesn’t know the answer, Eleanor thought. That’s why he’s being so polite. Or he does. She spared a glance for her grandfather, but he was miles away, his gaze set on the crackling fire.

  Allen didn’t answer for a long moment. “I have decided against that,” he said, brightening, as if he’d never had the idea in the first place. “I’m examining my options.”

  The Reverend blinked once, then again, what passed for pique in the man. “You gave your word, Allen. You declared for divinity school and—”

  “Father, let him finish,” Mrs. Dulles intervened.

  “He already has, I think, Mother,” Foster said.

  “Yes,” Allen said, “I have. Excuse me.” He stood, leaving the dining room in an awkward silence. The screen door slammed and Allen’s footfalls slammed over the porch floorboards.

  “What good’s his word?” the Reverend asked dejectedly. “He has never learnt duty.”

  “Let him be,” consoled Grandpa. “He’s only a freshman yet, and duty can be a damned empty thing, you know.”

  They reflected on this while dessert arrived, Grandma Foster’s trademark pumpkin pie. But the white anger on the Reverend’s cheeks did not fade until well after dinner, when the traditional Thanksgiving fireworks Foster always set off filled the night sky with sizzling arcs and blossoms of hot light. Allen made a point of staying near Grandpa.

  While the rockets exploded overhead, Eleanor slipped away to the small yard behind Sully’s shack of a house, to the tree that shaded his fish packing shed. She shinnied up, a packet of five cigarettes in her teeth, ready to be stuck in the elm’s cleft. There, to her astonishment, she found her cardigan, neatly folded. In the cardigan pocket there was a handwritten note in Mo Reavey’s copybook letters.

  Dear Miss Dulls

  I didden want to cause troubl for yr brother but hes a right fish. Here is yr sweter. Thanks. I talkt to my pa and things are better now.

  Maureen Frances Reavey

  At breakfast next morning, Allen was nowhere to be seen. Foster, rowing out with his law books for a last day’s cramming on Duck Island, finally spotted him on the mainland, walking the pitched dunes to the east of the harbor, head down, a prodigal alone with his secrets, his a slow progress in the sand.

  III

  BRYN MAWR, PENNSYLVANIA

  OCTOBER 1914

  The rain pecked at the window overlooking the perfectly clipped lawn, a misty rain that made Eleanor daydream the France of her childhood visits: fertile, lush hills, a yeasty medieval tang about the courtyard from freshly tilled monastery fields. She pictured a knot garden with stone benches that made one want poetry read aloud by a curly-haired, black-eyed troubadour named Jacques or Jean-Michel.

  The crisp Professor Crandall, known—not within earshot—as the Tsarina, was reciting Shakespeare, an improving feature of her lectures, saved for Fridays. Eleanor had been at Bryn Mawr but six weeks of her first fall term and her head was spinning. Little of Watertown had prepared her for the sheer headlong flight into new books, new voices, new lives to watch and be part of, new intelligence from womanhood all over America.

  Eleanor felt a nudge from her left. She glanced sidelong, to be greeted by the wide debutante grin of Thelma Keating, a product of careful Main Line breeding and unfailingly confident. Thelma rolled her eyes and mouthed Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou? just as the division bell rang three-twenty, marking the end of English 101A for that Friday. The professor scowled fiercely over her pince-nez as the brave ones shut books and notebooks in the middle of her speech. Eleanor kept hers open: she was in the front row.

  “Ladies, Monday, Act Four!” Professor Crandall announced. A sudden silence de
scended as the intimidating Tsarina shut her own text and took in her charges with a beady eye. “And the essay on courtly love is due Wednesday. No excuses!” Crandall’s voice disappeared into the unstoppable hubbub of twenty spirited young women headed for the door, for the weekend’s prospects—not least misleading the local boys or an illicit cigarette or draft of wine in a tin cup by candlelight after the closely chaperoned Haverford freshmen departed.

  That October, America watched, simultaneously horrified and smug, as Europe fought a pitched war from Belgium to Switzerland to the immense reaches of White Russia, doomed to deadlock in the mud. Even quiet days among the Gothic cloisters and shadowed archways of Bryn Mawr felt the knife’s edge of life and death half a world away. One of the German girls had gone home and three of the French, including Yvette Herriot-Duclos, a sweet girl whom everyone liked, from Eleanor’s own hall in the Rockefeller dorm. The sole Russian on campus, a sugar tycoon’s dazzling ice-blonde daughter, had lost her only brother somewhere near a killing ground called Tannenberg, where entire divisions of the Tsar’s vast imperial army had disappeared in an afternoon. She vanished herself, the same day the indecipherable telegram arrived, when a somber mustachioed chauffeur came for her and her many trunks. The dean was annoyed, the rumor went, because the Siberian had taken a crate full of library books with her. Eleanor didn’t believe it: the Russian girl was notorious for never doing a lick of serious work. Perhaps, knowing voices said, she’d simply taken up with that lover of hers in New York, the famous actor—there were less sane reactions to the war.

  On the other hand, Eleanor did believe one of the seniors, a forthright Southern belle whose father was thought to have made his fortune financing dark business deals involving battleships and shells and Mexican banks. This war wasn’t the two-week cakewalk the smart-aleck newspaper columnists were fighting. No, she said firmly, if someone was making money, this was going to be one long-drawn-out war. And thank God we live in America, she’d drawled in the college coffee shop over “muddle,” the home-brewed treacly-sweet cocoa everyone drank by the gallon. Foster had agreed when Eleanor shared this assessment in her weekly letter—and Foster’s opinion was Eleanor’s gospel.

  Eleanor cursed her family’s upstate New York frugality as she buttoned her coat. She had neither pocket money for the vaudeville house nor train fare home for the weekend. She would work. Already the cabs were queuing for the rich ones to catch the afternoon train to Penn Station, where they would be met by impossibly interesting people, Eleanor was sure. Surrounded by ebullient young women of all stripes, she lived her days frozen in a penumbra of reserve. Some nights, almost paralyzed with self-consciousness, she slept on the floor of her quadruple freshman room, wrapped in her mother’s steamer rug, the only way she could find sleep. In the end, the dam was finally breached by a small piece of paper.

  The stone stairwells rang with voices as she followed the tide of undergraduates out into the gusting rain; it was falling faster now, turning the gray stonework black. As they left the building, Thelma trotted behind her, her piping voice high and clear. “The thing, Ellie, about the Slug”—Thelma’s pejorative for her unfortunate roommate—“is that she doesn’t bathe. She smells. I can’t abide it. But the Raven”—the incorruptible director of room assignments—“can’t abide me. It’s a standoff. You’re the best listener in the whole dorm, Ellie. Whatever shall I do?”

  As they walked at a good clip across the quadrangle in the slanting rain, Thelma, whose father owned a power company, warmed to her next theme—Eleanor’s devotion to her studies, a failing, Thelma felt certain, she herself could remedy if only Eleanor would visit the Keatings some weekend. “You’ve got to get out of that library basement, Ellie, you’re going to turn into a troll,” and so on until they reached the dorm entrance, where, in Eleanor’s usually vacant mail cubbyhole, stood a green paper, square, folded in half. The bored hall clerk handed it over, returning to her crossword.

  Grace Dunlop, beauty, redhead, and heretic, was demanding a rendezvous in that same library basement this evening. “Dear El,” the note read in purple ink, “meet me near the poetry stacks, close to seven. V important. Swimming (penance). GD.” Grace had underlined “important” several times. This was puzzling. They had shared a couple of awkward walks after psychology class and Eleanor had helped Grace with a paper on Chaucer, but, aside from a high tea interrupted when Grace was called away on family business the week before, their contacts had been entirely in Grace’s hands. Eleanor was at once her social and intellectual inferior, and not even in the same firmament as the beautiful Grace in the way of popularity. Not since Eleanor at age ten had declaimed to a bemused constellation of diplomatic worthies that “Theodore Roosevelt has very big teeth”—an offense for which Grandma Foster barely forgave her, even after Eleanor’s summary banishment without dessert—had she said or done anything remotely scandalous. But Grace Dunlop? She radiated scandal from every hair of her impossibly auburn head.

  At dinner Eleanor struggled not to think of Grace’s enviable shape in the swimming pool, until Thelma’s incessant chatter demolished that vision. Eleanor battled her way dutifully through the sharp rain to the grand main library, which glowed magically from within, rectangles of yellow light in the pitch dark.

  She settled among the basement poetry stacks at six-fifteen and set herself five hundred words on Héloïse and Abelard. But the clock and her nerves occupied her more than poetry, and her handwriting, never good, scrabbled all over the page. Grace will never come, she thought. Grace will never come.

  Sitting alone, she had no idea what was expected of her. In the distance came the clip of leather on stone, fast, firm. Eleanor rose and walked to the basement window at the end of the aisle and laid her hand against the cool glass; it left a nimbus of mist. Heat. She shuddered.

  “Ma poupée,” Grace announced. “You’re here!”

  Eleanor turned to find Grace was smiling, fine teeth showing, pale green eyes set on her, appraising. She dropped a maroon carpetbag at her feet, clothes spilling out, a tennis racquet clattering onto the floor. Her wet coppery hair gleamed brown-black, its waves curled like seaweed against her forehead and neck. Grace managed at once chaos and stillness; the clash of momentum and languidness that left Eleanor feeling well less than average.

  “I had a swim to sober up,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “Been drinking all day. I’ve the breath of a boulevardier, darling.” She bent close to Eleanor. “Here, see.” The sharp smell of chlorine mixed with the aroma of gin. Grace beamed at her. “Thanks for being here, darling. Only one I can trust.” She launched her body into a wooden chair in the corridor between the stacks. “You scholarship girls—shining example to us all.” She shook her hair out and a flick of water reached Eleanor’s cheek. “Or should I say, can you talk? You look silent and pained, Ellie.”

  “My essay’s not starting well.” Her voice sounded so feeble.

  “What’s it about?”

  Eleanor cleared her throat. “Héloïse and Abelard.”

  “Unhappy, unhappier, unhappiest. There’s a nice short essay. Beginning, middle, end, just like Crandall likes.” She smiled again. “Sorry, that’s not helping. I’ve been away. Our last visit was interrupted, you’ll remember, darling.”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “My uncle died,” Grace said evenly. “Something in his brain. It was very sudden. I got there before he died. The funeral was this morning.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Grace’s eyes were lit up, feline. “And the walls came tumbling down, darling.” She smiled her brilliant smile again. “He took all afternoon to die, you know. Struggled. Not pleasant.”

  Eleanor flinched. “Grace! Why are you telling me this?”

  Grace threw her head back and laughed. “Because you’re you, Ellie. Because you watch and you think and because you’ll tell me what you think. Because you’re brave.” She let her laughter die. “People think I’m a joke. No, don’t argue, darling, I’ll thi
nk less of you. People think I’m a joke, the mad Washington redhead. I’ll show you how mad I am. D’you know what’s more terrible than hate?”

  Eleanor was mystified. “No.”

  “It’s the moment you realize not everyone is nice. It’s a dreadfully frightening moment. I was thirteen. Six years ago—when I watched my uncle in his courtroom in New York. I went because I was sent by my aunt—to see my uncle battle these immigrant shirt-factory women. To make an impression, Ellie. I never would have gone on my own. That’s the paradox.”

  They sat at an acute angle, in an alcove smelling of must, most of Germany’s poetry since the Middle Ages behind them in rows on the wrought iron shelves, while Grace Dunlop opened her Pandora’s box. She recounted her uncle’s story dispassionately, a stream of reportage made all the more scathing by her cold distance.

  “Those women. Yes. There were nearly five hundred of them,” Grace began, “Russian and Polish Jews and Sicilians mostly, women and girls, crowded together on workbenches behind locked doors—the supervisors feared the girls would take breaks or steal materials if they weren’t locked in. It was, in a word, a filthy, badly heated, and almost unventilated sweatshop, darling—lung diseases ten-a-penny. One exit when the doors were locked, a steel ladder to the roof. Picture that if you can, darling. I can’t,” she said simply. “There are abattoirs more humane.”

  One of the librarians passed, shushing Grace, who paid no mind. “The women eventually struck the place,” she continued, “in the winter of 1910. The police beat them, right in the street, in full view of the reporters and passersby. In the end,” Grace judged, “it meant nothing.”

  Grace rummaged in her carpetbag and pulled out a silver flask. She took a deep pull at the liquor; Eleanor could smell the juniper vapor of gin.

  “And changed nothing, nothing at all,” Grace declared. “Because, when the fire started one day six months later, the doors were still locked and the flames tore through the remnants and the clippings. A crematorium.” She halted, weighted by something so great Eleanor thought it might break her. “One hundred and forty-six women died. Most of them couldn’t speak English, so they died crying out in Polish and Yiddish and Italian for a God who would never help them fly when they threw themselves out the windows.”