Homeland

by John Jakes

  Pork’s huge paunchy body moved toward the gilt-lettered doors of the brewery offices like a whale in the sea of wringing-wet air. He didn’t ask to see the proprietor. Rather, he stated that he would see him, at once. No, he had no appointment. A flunky ran upstairs, ran down again with Joe Crown’s clerk, and in a few moments Pork was seated before the owner’s desk.

  He saw many things of which to disapprove. The German flag brazenly displayed. A desk bereft of a panel of bell buttons, which Pork considered the sign of a progressive industrial firm. Pork’s LaSalle Street headquarters was elaborately wired with signal bells, each with a slightly different sound; he could summon one of his many underlings merely by pressing a particular button.

  What he disapproved of most was the man staring at him with the sort of stare Pork could only deem unfriendly. He vowed to remain civil while he stated his case.

  He was frankly shocked by Joe Crown’s appearance. He remembered the brewer as robust, despite his relatively small frame. This morning he was shrunken; sapped, somehow. His face had a mealy and haggard cast. The damned anarchist bomb, no doubt.

  “Hello, Joe. Thank you for consenting to see me. Sorry to hear about the disruption of your production—oh, and I believe there was loss of life also. Regrettable. At least the back of the strike is broken, and that devil Debs is facing prison. Have you read the latest freight tonnages?”

  Joe Crown dropped his hand to his watch chain and rubbed some kind of animal tooth hanging there. “Yes.”

  The silence crashed. Pork squirmed in the chair. It was too small. All chairs were too small, except those specially built for him.

  “Joe, you and I have not seen each other for some time—”

  “That’s true. You sold our restaurant excellent meats for several years. I’ve always regretted the incident that ended our relationship, though frankly I have never understood why it occurred. I do know that you subsequently black-balled me to keep me out of the Commercial Club. A friend told me the stated reason. Too foreign, you said. I sounded too German—I didn’t speak good English. My English is as good as yours.”

  Pork’s forced cordiality had already evaporated. “Sir, I’ll tell you straight out. I am not accustomed to—”

  “May I ask you to state your business?” Joe indicated an open window, through which came the racket of a steam drill and carpenters’ hammers. “We are rebuilding the bottling house. We are under great strain here. So please come to the point. What do you want of me?”

  I was right, he’s detestable. Arrogant as always.

  Pork unsnapped the catch on his portfolio. “This.” He placed a folded sheet of notepaper on the desk.

  Joe Crown picked it up and read it as Pork continued. “Written to my daughter Juliette by someone who is your ward, or at least a relative. Note that he wrote endearments at the bottom. In the German language.”

  Joe Crown handed the note back. He was pink with annoyance. Pork had scored a march; taken him by surprise. “How did you come by that note, may I ask?”

  “A young man of my daughter’s acquaintance, a fine chap named Strickland Welliver, chanced to see Juliette and your relative together in Lincoln Park. They have apparently been meeting secretly on Sundays. Welliver wrote me a letter about it. Due to the press of business it failed to come to my attention until this week. I immediately set a watch on Juliette, as well as on the grounds of my home located on Prairie Av—”

  “I know where you live. Go on.”

  Pinpoint sweat drops glistened on Pork’s dewlaps. “This person and my daughter have evidently worked out a system for sending and receiving private messages. The note was found under a stone at the rear of my property. One of my grooms spied on the young man as he trespassed to place it there.”

  Like a fine tragedian, Pork manipulated the moment. He reached for the note, a star sapphire big as a dime flashing on his little finger. He thrust the note into the portfolio, closed the brass latch, sat back. The visitor’s chair creaked.

  “I have ferreted out the boy’s name. I forced Juliette to reveal it. Well, force is perhaps too strong. She gave me the name the moment I confronted her. She has lately displayed an uncharacteristic defiance—the result of the unwholesome influence of my sister-in-law, whom you don’t know. I also place equal blame on this boy. Paul Crown.”

  “Paul is my nephew. He arrived in this country two years ago. I haven’t been pleased with his behavior of late. That isn’t the issue, however. What am I supposed to do about this revelation?”

  “Order your nephew to stay away from Juliette. Cease and desist with these dirty little notes and clandestine meetings. How do I know what filth he’s written in a foreign tongue?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing a high-minded man like yourself would object to, Vanderhoff. Quite romantic, actually.”

  “You’re toying with me, sir. Now listen—you tell your nephew that I’ll have him arrested and horsewhipped if he comes near my daughter once more. I won’t have her tainted by association with some mongrel German immigrant.”

  “Vanderhoff, my nephew observed his seventeenth birthday last month. He has lived more or less independently for some years, and even though I have reservations about his character, he is more mature than many twice his age. I hold him responsible for his own actions. I’ll not defend him or protect him. You may speak to him if you wish. He works here. In the malthouse at the moment. My clerk will be happy to direct you.”

  Damned insufferable kraut! Pork wouldn’t tolerate it. “Sir, get this clear. I am not going to muck about in a dingy brewery, confronting a common workman on the subject of my daughter.”

  Crown shrugged. “Suit yourself. If you won’t speak to Paul directly, I can’t help you. Good morning.”

  “By God, Crown, you can’t dismiss me like this!”

  Joe Crown pushed himself up from his chair like some savage beast arising from slumber, and came around the desk. Blanching, Pork heaved to his feet and began to back away. His breathing was rapid, almost painful. A sharp chest pang made him wince.

  “Get out, Vanderhoff. You made a fortune in a nasty trade and it turned you into a pompous ass. I don’t like you, and I don’t like your insulting language. Walk down those stairs before I throw you down.”

  To his everlasting shame and rage, Pork obeyed.

  How right he was to hate Joe Crown, as he had ever since that fateful Sunday afternoon five years ago. It especially galled him that he’d liked Joe Crown when he was a customer—well, at least respected him despite his foreign birth. They were strongly alike in some ways. Both ambitious, dedicated businessmen, tough and canny and therefore successful.

  Pork’s wholesale division turned a fine profit purveying sausages and sliced meats to restaurants, including Crown’s Bierstube. As a favor to a good customer, he supplied the same items at cost for the brewery’s annual picnic in August. As a matter of good will, Pork always visited the picnic for an hour or two.

  On the August afternoon in question, hellishly hot, Pork drank too much Crown lager in a short time, and was soon compelled to wobble to a stinking outhouse set up at the edge of the picnic grove. As he was relieving himself, he heard Joe Crown’s voice through the thin wooden wall. Crown was chatting with someone, about his past:

  “My first offer of an apprenticeship in Cincinnati was a good one but for one thing. My prospective employer was a butcher, who had a substantial packing operation on the side. Killing and selling the parts of dumb animals is a dirty, bloody business, Fred. I suppose I’m a hypocrite since I enjoy eating meat, and someone must supply it. But I don’t consider it pleasant work, or clean, though I’d never say such a thing to a supplier like Mason Vanderhoff.”

  Pork stood with his forgotten member in hand, quaking with wrath.

  “Brewing, now—brewing’s a fine trade. When people drink beer they’re happy. Brewing is also a good German occupation. That’s why I decided to cut ice for much lower wages, in hopes of working myself into a brewery.” Cr
own’s voice was slowly fading. “I absolutely did not want to be a butcher. They’re held in low esteem in America and Germany too. Around the world, in fact.”

  Pork couldn’t tolerate it. He rushed outside, forgetting his open fly, and chased Crown, who was strolling arm in arm with a man he recognized as the brewmaster. Lurching into a sunny glade, Pork came at Crown from behind, seized his shoulder, and threw a punch.

  Joe Crown defended himself. He felled Pork with one blow. Sat him on his rump in the dirt, a humiliation never to be forgotten or forgiven.

  “I don’t know what this is all about, Mason, but I don’t take kindly to being attacked without warning. I trust I didn’t hit you too hard. Let me help you up.”

  He reached down with his right hand. Pork spat in his palm.

  They never did business again. In the autumn of that same year, Joe Crown’s name came up for membership in the Commercial Club. Pork’s vote kept him out.

  Recalling the picnic always put Pork into a state. For most of the ride downtown, he kept yanking at his knotted cravat, fighting for breath in the hot interior of the carriage. The pain in his chest was gone, but not the other, deeper pain. Joe Crown’s insulting words expressed a shameful truth. The truth that drove Pork on and on, to earn more, amass more, display more …

  The Vanderhoffs had been among the pioneer settlers in the Connecticut colony. Several generations of Vanderhoff men had raised hogs, slaughtered them, and cured the hams, shoulders, and sides in the smokehouse of a farm in the woods above the fine little town of Darien. Some of Pork’s earliest memories—perhaps he was four or five—consisted of images of the abattoir in the woods; the killing barn where his father worked.

  Pork knew very well why the Joe Crowns of the world scorned the butchering and packing trades. Pork’s own memories explained it: the ramshackle barn, the soil of its floor crusted over with dried blood and offal residue, the iridescent green flies and audacious rats that ran even in daylight. His first playthings were hog bones; Mama could afford no other toys.

  When he started to school, he was already too stout. The Vanderhoff family ate poorly, so diet was not the cause; rather, something in his physical makeup.

  The stench of the family trade was always on his clothes at school. That and the stigma attached to the trade kept him from having good friends. Within a short time, his classmates gave him the nickname he never escaped; the name that defined his bulk, and eventually his trade. Pork.

  Although the killing barn was well hidden in the woods, it continually made its presence known. Hook-beaked, leather-winged carrion birds were always roosting and sailing above the trees. The little stream below the farm was fouled and clogged by the blood and parts Pork’s father regularly dumped. From time to time irate selectmen from the town came to call, claiming that children who drank the water downstream had fallen ill. Pork’s father listened and did nothing.

  Pork’s father had lifelong pretensions to refinement which his son inherited. He also had an impractical daydreamer’s nature, and a propensity for failure, like all the generations of Vanderhoffs before him. Pork sneered at daydreaming. “A theory has no value at the bank,” he liked to say.

  In the carriage, Pork kept sinking into the hateful pool of remembrance. He thought of his poor defeated mother, whom he’d loved devotedly. Once when he was little he’d stood at her knee watching her put on her only pair of shoes. It would never leave him, the sight of her dirty sock sticking from the burst toe of the shoe, the plaintive sound of her voice. “When you grow up, you’ll work hard to buy Mama some nice shoes, won’t you?”

  “Oh yes, Mama,” he’d wept. “Mason will work for you. For Mama. For Mama.”

  Like the Chicago tycoon slightly above him in reputation and riches, good old Phil Armour, who boasted, “We use all the pig but the squeal,” Pork Vanderhoff had fled the hardscrabble region of the Northeast for a greater opportunity that seemed to glimmer in the West of the young nation. Pork and his brother Israel Washington Vanderhoff six years his junior, first ran a packing operation on a flatboat on the Ohio River. In that period Pork developed a curious and defensive pride in his work. He liked to boast that he could cleave the skull of a prime hog with an ax, and heave it into the boiling kettle for debristling, faster than any other man or boy. He frequently won bets on it.

  His emaciated brother I.W. turned out to be something of a genius with mathematics, money, and real estate. By age twenty-one he was also a confirmed drunkard. During the Civil War, I.W. convinced his brother to sell mess pork futures at forty dollars a barrel, anticipating a price drop at war’s end. After Appomattox the price went down to eighteen dollars a barrel. They had their first clean killing.

  The Vanderhoff brothers followed Phil Armour and Gus Swift to Chicago. There they built their business, capitalizing on technological advancements that could enrich packers smart enough to seize upon them. Armour was the leader in this; the first to hang carcasses on hooks on a powered chain that moved them speedily and efficiently through the plant. He pioneered the centralized shipping of pork, mutton, and beef from a major rail hub. The German lager beer makers installed refrigeration equipment well before the packers had it, and again, Armour the innovator seized the idea, recognizing a way to convert slaughtering and packing from a seasonal to a year-round trade, not dependent on cold weather or a supply of expensive purchased ice.

  Pork Vanderhoff had walked in blood and animal brains since boyhood. He had dumped thousands of tons of heads and feet and tankage in any available creek or river. He had paid two dollars a cartload to subhuman drones who hauled the refuse away to the prairie and buried it. He’d encouraged his wayward brother into bouts of sobriety, seeing to it that he took the water cure at least once, and often twice, annually. He still relied on I.W.’s financial acumen and a natural charm that stood him in well with the wives of Manhattan bankers; I.W. had been forced to move to New York after a sordid and potentially violent sexual incident with a foreman’s wife in Chicago.

  As a result of the brothers’ success Pork acquired not only wealth but an aristocratic wife from one of Kentucky’s noblest families. He fathered a lovely daughter who would marry well and bear fine grandsons. He was respectable and well regarded by his fellow businessmen. He pleaded with his male friends not to call him Pork—Nell fairly raved when she heard the name spoken—but somehow it stuck, perpetuated by newspapers, his employees, and no doubt his own appearance.

  Pork Vanderhoff controlled a veritable empire of processing and distribution. Enormous pens in Kansas City. Subsidiary plants for utilization of the by-products. America ate Vanderhoff hams and sausages, buttered its toast with oleomargarine with a base of Vanderhoff steam-rendered lard, took its Saturday night bath with soap made with Vanderhoff tallow, glued its wallpaper and furniture joints and envelope flaps with Big “V” Brand glues. Six thousand refrigerator cars shuttling between the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf bore the Big “V” insignia. Out of this success had come important friends, civic honors, memberships in exclusive clubs, status and standing in Chicago, the Republican Party, the nation.

  He hadn’t achieved all this so his daughter could marry some damned foreign upstart. He would separate Juliette from this pernicious influence forever.

  He hit on the scheme the moment he emerged from the elevator. Gleeful, he stepped into his opulent paneled office, which predictably renewed his sense of strength and control.

  Nell had chosen the dark teakwood furniture. In the corners, Wall Street and Board of Trade tickers juttered and spewed tapes. Opposite the desk, beside the door, a full-length likeness of I.W. surveyed the office from an ornate gilt frame. The portraitist had executed his commission wisely, removing the splotches from I.W.’s cheeks and reshaping the beetlike nose. It was a manly, no-nonsense picture of Republican rectitude.

  Around the walls, spotted between large framed chromos of various Big “V” plants and marshaling yards, hung mounted heads of elk, boar, grizzly, none of which Po
rk had shot, or even hunted. He liked to imagine he had, though.

  At his desk he examined messages and telegrams that had arrived since his departure for Crown’s. Nothing urgent, and only one message that needed to be dealt with before the end of the day. This was a lengthy telegram from Mark Hanna of Ohio, once again promoting Bill McKinley for the Republican presidential nomination two years hence. Hanna requested a substantial donation to the party war chest to help counter the continuing agitations of the free silver crowd.

  Pork decided to send a draft for two thousand. He was a confirmed gold bug. He hated the free silver radicals. Only last week, over supper, he had told dour red-whiskered Phil Armour, “Those men will have to be dealt with as crushingly as the damned Southerners who rebelled against this country.”

  He stabbed a bell on the thirty-button panel at the right of his desk and heard it ring in the bullpen beyond the heavy carved door. He leaned back in his huge chair, more relaxed. He was vastly pleased with his solution to the problem of Juliette. Further, he knew how to implement it over her objections. The strategy had worked before, and would work again.

  His chief clerk, Roswell, knocked and hurried in. “Mr. Vanderhoff,” he murmured, his pencil poised, his pad ready, his mind blanked to receive its master’s imprint.

  “Steamship schedules,” Pork barked. “New York to Europe, now until the end of the year. Get me anything you can on the resorts and spas, too. Only the finest. I want to make the arrangements at once. Perhaps yet today.”

  “A vacation, sir?” Scribbling, Roswell at the same time managed a sycophantic smile.

  “That’s right. Mrs. Vanderhoff and myself are taking Juliette across the water. It will be the start of my daughter’s grand tour. I will bring Mrs. Vanderhoff home after a month or two, but Juliette may be abroad for as much as a year.”

  Pork was tense as he awaited the encounter with his daughter that same evening. He tap-tapped the thick yellow envelope on the blotter. The envelope bore the emblem of Thomas Cook’s, and the address of its local office.