by John Jakes
Dr. Calhoun Manigault was an exemplar of the worst side of the South, Joe thought as the buggy rolled along; one of those who were stubborn about that past in which they’d been defeated in war and humiliated in peace. They perpetuated fictions to defend their actions and absolve their guilt. At meetings of the board of the textile mill in which Joe held shares, or at banks and clubs in Charleston, he still heard a lot of cant about the blissful antebellum days. How “our darkies” had been far happier than Negroes living in the slums up North—never mind that in the slums up North, they were free. Not fairly paid, or decently treated. But free. Joe had looked deep into the wounded eyes of enough Carolina blacks, including his tenants Orpheus and Lydie, to know that what the white Carolinians said was a lie.
Even now, thirty years later, the wounds of the war still festered. All over Dixie, the embittered whites were using the law to deprive free black men like Orpheus of their hard-won rights. Baffling new literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements for voting. There were black schools, and black townships, and black balconies in churches once again. There were black toilets at the railway depots, with stern warning signs about observing the rules of separation.
Like many another Northerner, Joe wasn’t ready to accept a black youth as a suitor for his daughter, or even a neighbor on Michigan Avenue. But he would readily have invited the best of them—a lawyer, a musician, the prominent young educator Booker T. Washington—into his home, for conversation or dinner, without hesitation. He considered this attitude liberal as well as morally correct.
Prissy’s head bumped gently on his shoulder. Although her eyes were closed, her brown hand with its white palm found his. Joe needed but one hand for the reins of the plodding horse. He held Prissy’s hand and thought about Carl, and made up his mind.
With Prissy returned to the house of her parents, and Ilsa reassured that she would be fine, Joe was finally able to retire to his study about two o’clock. A thick envelope of memoranda and letters had arrived from Stefan Zwick yesterday, brought down to Chimneys by a horseback messenger.
He’d no sooner opened the envelope than a fiendish cackling and howling came through the open window. He batted the gauzy curtain aside and stuck his head out. Fritzi was capering on the front piazza, tearing at her hair and screeching like a goblin. “Take the rope from my neck! Take it away!”
“In the name of heaven, stop that!” He flung his leg over the sill and climbed out. From a table of white-painted wicker, his daughter plucked a small paper-covered book. Some kind of play text, he saw.
“Papa, I’m practicing. I’m Henry Irving in The Bells.”
Last year Joe and Ilsa had taken Fritzi to see the celebrated English actor perform his most famous role, Burgomaster Mathias, the slayer of an elderly Polish Jew who passed through the burgomaster’s village in a sleigh. Haunted by guilt, and the sound of sleigh bells, in the third act Mathias went convincingly mad before a thrilled audience.
“Well, I can’t abide the noise. I am trying to concentrate on work. Give me that, please.”
“Papa, I paid a lot for this prompt book in Chicago. A whole fifty cents! Please don’t—”
“I said I’ll take it.” He grabbed it away, stepped around Fritzi, and stomped into the house through the main door.
Ilsa rushed into the airy central hall from the dining room. “Joe?” Without answering, he wheeled into the study and kicked the door shut behind him.
One crisis after another; was there no end? He was in a fury. He hated the feeling, the weakness it represented, but it was uncontrollable. He looked at the prompt book in his hand. He’d intended to keep it for an hour and then return it. Suddenly it was a hateful symbolic object. He flung the book into the grate and set fire to it with a match.
Late in the afternoon, as the winter sun was setting, Ilsa quietly entered the study. Joe was sitting motionless at his rolltop desk, his eyes seemingly focused somewhere beyond the litter of brewery correspondence. After a moment he glanced up. He noticed Usa had put on a shawl over her shirtwaist.
“Will you come take a walk with me?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s a good idea. I have something to say.”
“Fritzi would like her book if—”
“Her book’s gone.” He pointed to the black ash in the grate.
“Oh, Joe,” she said, shaking her head. The simplicity of her condemnation angered him all over again.
He and Ilsa walked down a path of crushed oyster shell behind the great house. The path ran beside a high hedge of crepe myrtle, bare and severely trimmed back for the winter; then it curved to the edge of a sloping bank. Below the bank, reeds extended west for more than a hundred yards. Beyond lay the water of the tidal marsh, its sun-struck surface shining like the bottom of a copper pot.
Usa took his hand and pressed it against her side. “You have something to say, but I will speak first. Joe, I want to tell you something you know already. There is too much trouble in this family.”
He tried to disengage his hand. She gave a small, wry smile, as if to say his reaction was expected. She didn’t let go.
“Are you blaming me?”
“Stating a fact. Come on, walk, don’t be so stubborn.”
They continued their slow course along the path. It led to a point of land hooking out toward the water. At its widest place twenty yards from the point, foot-thick limbs of a gigantic live oak shaded both the land and the marsh. Ilsa leaned against the trunk.
“Our son left us, who knows for how long? I have faith that we’ll see him again someday, but that doesn’t make it easier to bear. Little Pauli, who came to America with such great hopes, he’s gone too; I hope it isn’t as far. We mustn’t drive Fritzi away. Or Carl.”
“Fritzi’s full of this damned lunacy about stage acting—”
“I think it’s just a passing phase. All girls go through them.”
“How can you be so sure it’s a phase?”
Ilsa patted his face, gently, without reproof. “I am her mother. You are many things, but that’s one thing you can never be, my sweetheart.”
The endearment surprised and disarmed him. All at once his anger softened. From the pocket of the old frock coat he’d put on for the walk, he pulled one of the expensive Havana cigars he’d begun to favor lately. He bit and spat the end, then struck a match on his boot.
“All right, I take my share of the blame for everything that’s happened lately. More than my share.”
“No, you mustn’t—”
“Let me finish, please, it’s my turn. I try to act in good faith, according to what I was taught, and what I believe. I make decisions that way. Carl will attend that school in the East. He needs the discipline, to settle him down. I will explain that to him tonight.”
“So,” Ilsa said, suddenly cool. “Only the husband decides, is that it?”
“What’s wrong with you? It’s always been that way in the country we came from, and here too. It’s been that way in our marriage.”
“Indeed it has, but the world’s changing. Women are changing.”
“I’m too old,” he said with a dogged shake of his head. “I was raised a certain way and it’s the only way I know.”
“Yes, yes. Ordnung. Well, my dear Joe, it’s time you took a different path, this one is leading you astray. You must—oh, what’s the English for anpassen?”
“Adapt.”
“Yes. When a savage storm rises—one of those hurricanes that sometimes strike this coast, let us say—the trees bend. Even the strongest bends in order to survive. Because God always sends the storms, Joe. Always.”
“You’re asking a lot of a man my age.”
“What on earth does age have to do with it?”
“If you don’t understand, I can’t explain. I’ve made the decision about Carl.”
“Without consulting me.”
“Have it any way you want it. It’s done.”
He flung the cigar down and walked away from her, back t
oward Chimneys.
Ilsa sent word by Delphine’s husband Ford that she was tired and wanted to rest rather than eat supper. Fritzi and Carl hardly spoke during the meal. Afterward, Joe wanted a schnapps in the study. Ford brought it to him.
“Be anything else, Mr. Crown?”
“Yes, please ask Carl to come here.”
Shortly the boy’s footsteps sounded in the hall. Joe twisted the key that raised the wick in the desk lamp, brightening the room. It would probably be decades before electricity or a gas utility reached this far into the Low Country.
Carl Crown entered and stood with his hand on the doorknob. The boy’s height and stocky, powerful build showed that he was maturing rapidly.
“Carl,” Joe said, keeping an even tone.
“Father.”
“Did you see Prissy tonight?”
“Yes, sir. I told her I was sorry.”
“As well you should. You played too roughly. Prissy’s a girl, weaker than you. You’re much too careless about your strength, Carl. I know it isn’t intentional, but we must cure it. In the fall, you are going to a new school, in the state of New York. They emphasize scholastics, but they emphasize gentlemanly deportment, too.”
He showed Carl the booklet and explained several of the points it contained. Throughout, Carl stood straight and silent as a little Prussian soldier. When Joe was finished, Carl made the one comment his father wanted and expected:
“Yes, sir.”
Joe hugged his son and kissed him good night. Carl left quietly. For a few moments Joe was content. At last he was restoring a measure of order to his world.
He rang a hand bell. When Ford arrived, Joe ordered a second schnapps. This surprised the black man. The master never drank two in an evening.
“Ford, have you seen Mrs. Crown?”
“Sir, Delphine said she took pillows an’ things to the spare bedroom. Told Delphine she was feeling poorly, she’d sleep better there.”
“I see. Thank you, Ford. That’s all.”
When Ford was gone, Joe slumped in his chair. He regretted he’d quarreled with Ilsa, but he was still angry with her. Ilsa had changed. He’d sensed it before, but tonight he felt it as a crushing certainty. He loved her, of course. He prized her intelligence, her backbone. Yet those very qualities were leading her on to areas in which women had no place. She experimented with new ideas too freely. They’d patch up the quarrel, he had no doubt of that. Ilsa had a boundless ability to forgive. But the larger issues still loomed.
Despite her protest that it was irrelevant, he was growing older, in mind and in body. He would be fifty-three on the last day of March. He hated the stiffness he was already feeling in his bones and joints. Further, he didn’t understand some of the crazy trends and doctrines blowing through the world. He was still a modernist in regard to inventions, technology, but he didn’t like the intellectual and moral atmosphere the new science was creating, at a speed impossible to cope with …
He finished the schnapps. His head buzzed. Some profound crisis was brewing in his life. He had heard that it often happened to men his age. They walked out of the house one night and disappeared forever. They tossed over a wife of thirty or forty years, married a woman half her age, and flung themselves into a pathetic parody of youth complete with hair dyes, garish suits, and fatherhood at sixty. The idea horrified him.
In his mind he saw a fearful image. The iron wedge Orpheus used to split his logs. The wedge hammered deeper and deeper into the heartwood, so deep it could never be dislodged until the thing into which it had been driven split asunder. Was he driving an iron wedge into his marriage?
Or was Ilsa?
He sat up a long time, worrying. Toward midnight, a storm began to rumble somewhere over the Atlantic. He shut the downstairs windows. To the east, sheets of white light shot across the sky.
As he climbed the stairs, incredibly tired, he heard the rain, and more thunder. He changed into his nightclothes, turned down their bed, hesitated and pulled the coverlet up again. He stole across the varnished pine floor of the hall, turned the handle stealthily, and crept into the room, and the bed, where Ilsa was sleeping. He hardly made a sound.
After an extended silence, she said, “I am awake.”
He rolled toward her. They reached for each other, embracing. Lightning burst outside, flashing through the slits in the closed shutters. They held each other tightly.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. And again, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, though he wondered if she believed it. “Did you tell Carl?”
“Yes.”
“How did he take it?”
“Better than I expected. Maybe he doesn’t like our home anymore.” The bitter thought had come suddenly.
Ilsa was quiet for another interval. “I saw that a new packet from Stefan had arrived. Was there anything from the detectives?”
“The weekly report. Nothing in it, as usual. What do they have to go on but a physical description that could apply to ten thousand young men? It’s a vast country, Ilsa. If he chooses to obey the law, as I hope he will, who will notice him? Certainly not some local police department.”
“Then you think he’s gone for good?”
“Ilsa, don’t—”
“Answer me, Joe.”
“Yes, I think he’s gone for good. I’m sorry. I take the blame.”
59
Paul
WEX TAUGHT HIM HOW to expose an Eastman dry plate in a big tripod camera, process it, and contact-print the negative plate by locking it in a frame with a sheet of printing paper, lugging the frame to the roof, and timing the exposure in the winter sunshine. Paul’s first such plate was a simple head study of his mentor; Wex had taken off his spectacles and managed a fey grin. After nervous moments on the roof—too much time? too little?—Paul carried the print downstairs, washed it, fixed it, and hung it up with clothespins.
He stood in front of it, cocking his head one way and another. The mustached old pixie grinned back at him from the dripping sheet. Paul swelled with pride. He had made this picture. Taken it—finished it—everything. Suddenly he clapped his hands, grinned, shuffled his feet in a joyous little dance, like a black boy he’d seen dancing for pennies on a street corner. His worries and disappointments seemed altogether trivial at this moment of discovery and self-esteem. Truly, it was a blessing to live in an age of miracles.
Three stalwarts of the First Ward Democratic Club hired Wex to photograph them for the club headquarters. The Democrats controlled the ward, and much else besides, and Wex had a solid relationship with them. He had a particular loyalty to the two bosses, an alderman named Coughlin and a saloon keeper named Kenna.
The three who called on Wex were underlings. Loud-spoken, and dressed in fancy clothes that managed to look cheap. Paul didn’t like them, but he recognized the significance of their swaggering airs. They had power in the city.
Wex blandly named his price—five dollars each. The pols yelped, swore, started to walk out. Wex laughed.
“Why are you so het up, boys? You know the club can afford it. Most of your cash comes from City Hall boodle, and there’s plenty of that, I hear.”
The pol who spoke for the group said all right, five smackers apiece was a deal. Smacker; dollar. Paul filed that away in his growing lexicon of slang.
Wex took more than a half hour posing and photographing each of the politicians; he was a perfectionist about his craft, if about nothing else. At the end of the session the leader said, “Send the pictures around fast as you can. Alderman Coughlin’s wanting a new one of himself. If these turn out good, we’ll put in a word.”
The unexpected profit of fifteen dollars, half in advance, elated Wex. “Dutch, let’s take the night off. There’s something I’ve been yearning to see for months. Now we can afford it, without a guilty conscience.”
“What is that?”
“Mr. Edison’s flicker parlor. We’ll have oysters at the Palmer House first.”
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In a narrow space at 148 State Street, the latest invention of the Wizard of Menlo Park could be enjoyed for five cents per view. It was snowing heavily when Paul and Wex walked in from the slushy street. Wex’s glasses were speckled with melting snow. It dripped from his old cracked shoes.
Despite the weather the parlor had four customers, including a respectable middle-aged woman wearing good clothes. Wex flung his arms out like a happy child. “Isn’t this something? They say Edison plans to spread these parlors all over America.”
They stepped up to the ticket counter. A pedestal nearby displayed a metallic bust of the great inventor. Behind this stood ten cabinets, back to back in two rows of five, each cabinet about three feet high and two feet deep. Although the walls of the Kinetoscope parlor were a bilious brown, management had provided plenty of electric light as well as a rail in front of each row of machines, for the comfort of patrons leaning forward over the eyepiece.
The man selling tickets was well dressed, in a suit, stiff collar, and string tie. Wex said, “Are you the manager, sir?”
“The owner. This is a parlor franchised by the Edison Kinetoscope Company.”
“How long are your films?”
“Approximately twenty seconds. A quarter permits you to see five.”
“What, a whole nickel for each?”
“You can’t expect genius to work for nothing. The Kinetoscope’s a fabulous invention.”
Wex bought two twenty-five-cent tickets and handed one to Paul. Moving away from the counter, Wex ticked Edison’s bust with a fingernail. “Fake,” he whispered. “Bronze paint on plaster.”
Paul’s pulsebeat quickened as they approached the cabinets. “These are the machines Mr. Edison didn’t deliver in time for the Exposition?”
“The same.”
Wex looked at the pictures in one row of Kinetoscopes, Paul the other. Edison’s subjects were inoffensive, not to say dull. Paul viewed “Organ Grinder,” “At the Barbershop”—watching haircuts was not his idea of excitement—“Shoeing Horses,” “Trained Bears,” and “Sandow the Great.” The last was the most appealing. The famous German strongman was posed against a plain dark backdrop, clad in a garment resembling a large diaper. It afforded an impressive display of Sandow’s flexing arms and quivering biceps.