Homeland

by John Jakes

  Bryan stepped back one pace. He rested his fingers on the podium and lowered his chin to the bosom of his shirt. He shut his eyes, sending a signal that he’d finished. A silence ensued.

  Then—pandemonium.

  Delegates stormed the platform, hauled Bryan down and hoisted him to their shoulders. Band music blared, barely heard in the din. Bryan’s coat was torn. His white handkerchief was snatched and ripped apart for souvenirs. He bounced dangerously on the shoulders of delegates trying to carry him through the crush in the aisles. In the galleries, people yelled and clapped and tossed hats in the air.

  Even Joe Crown was shaken. It was a powerful speech. A momentous speech. He knew it would change the course of the convention.

  “Magnificent. Just magnificent, wasn’t it?” He realized the handsome redhead was speaking to him.

  “Very accomplished,” he said, forced to shout.

  “I must have some air, I feel faint.”

  “Yes, I too. Permit me to go with you. I’ll go first, those stairs are jammed.”

  He fought his way down ahead of her, half dizzy with heat, wondering what in God’s name he was doing, but not stopping, not hesitating for one moment. Outside on the pavement where spectators without tickets marched up and down with Bryan for President banners, the woman fanned herself with her straw hat. Joe helped out by fanning her with his fedora.

  “Thank you, thank you.” She clutched his shirtsleeve. “I believe we’ve heard a speech that will go down in history. I believe we’ve heard the next President, don’t you?” The crowd surging out the doors crushed her against his vest. He felt the bump and press of her bosom. “The hall is unbearably hot. I must have some refreshment. There’s a little café across the way. I noticed it earlier. Won’t you join me?”

  Her face was inches from his. Her dark blue eyes probed with an easy candor. He saw in them a frightening image of himself saying yes, with all but certain consequences.

  And he wanted to say yes … “Thank you so much, I can’t. My coat’s still upstairs. Also, I am due to meet someone.” How lame it sounded.

  She withdrew, the heat in her lovely eyes cooling quickly. “Yes—well—I understand, of course.”

  She walked through the crowd and crossed the street. He watched her straw hat bobbing till it disappeared in the doorway of the café. He turned back into the Coliseum, groping for a cigar in his vest, hurrying away as fast as he could from the monstrous abyss of contemplated adultery.

  The Democratic convention nominated William Jennings Bryan for President, on a platform of unlimited coinage of silver.

  Joe Crown’s conversion to Republicanism dated from that day. Bryan was calling the rural poor to wage a class war. He wanted the kind of blood that flowed in the Pullman strike to flow again in every city and village and crossroads in America. He spread the poison that had ruined Joe Junior. Joe Crown had a certain nostalgic sympathy for the Men of ’48, but he was no revolutionary and never had been.

  He wrote a draft for three thousand dollars and sent it, together with a long letter pledging his support, his time, and more money, to Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Republican kingmaker. In due course he received a warm reply from Hanna, welcoming him to the Republican fold and promising him invitations to campaign functions involving such party notables as the Honorable Mr. Schurz and the Honorable Mr. Roosevelt.

  Joe never saw the handsome woman again. Thank God she’d never told him her name or address.

  75

  Paul

  AUGUST 29. THE LAST Saturday of the month. fifteen minutes past noon. Paul had been standing on the curbstone on East Huron Street, across from St. James Church, since fifteen minutes before eleven, when fine carriages with liveried drivers were already unloading wedding guests.

  Newspapers had printed the date and the time of the ceremony, half after eleven, weeks ago. And for weeks he’d argued with himself, wanting to stay away. Ultimately he couldn’t. The yearning to see her was too strong.

  Mary said St. James Episcopal was an old church, the swankiest of all the Protestant churches in the city. Paul had dressed carefully, to look respectable and as neat as possible. He’d put on his black Sears tennis shoes with corrugated rubber soles; very comfortable for long days on his feet. His bibless overalls were dark gray duck with leather knee pads, heavily scuffed. His shirt was lightweight Penang cloth striped vertically, blue and white, a ninety-eight-cent extravagance. To hide some of his face he’d bought a cheap flannel baseball cap in the flat-topped Chicago style. Stitched across the front were the words “White Stockings.”

  He loitered in the shade across from St. James for more than an hour, while organ music pealed from the church. The doors were open to catch any breeze.

  Both bride and groom must have entered by a side or rear door; he never saw them until the service ended and the triumphant music from Lohengrin burst forth, sending the carriage drivers scattering to their vehicles.

  Guests spilled from the church and down the wide steps, forming ranks three and four deep on either side. Cries of excitement went up as the bridal couple came out and dashed down the steps.

  Julie wore a shimmering white gown. Her face was a blur amid bobbing heads, waving arms, flying rice thrown by gentlemen in morning coats, women in long dresses and enormous wide-brimmed hats. Paul saw the girl he loved as no more than a snapshot image, gone almost the instant he spied her. She ducked into a large carriage parked at the foot of the steps. On its door gleamed a golden shield design with an unfamiliar symbol in each quarter section and a knight’s casque surmounting the whole.

  The groom stopped briefly to smile and clasp the hand of a male guest standing halfway down the steps. Elstree was older—middle-aged—but Paul already knew that.

  As the guest carriages began to depart, Paul stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away. At that moment he hated William Vann Elstree, wanted to do him physical harm. Elstree had denied him Julie. He imagined her soft arms around his neck that one sweet night at Radigan’s. Then he saw her with her new husband in the bridal bed …

  He cursed under his breath. He grasped a lamp post to steady himself and shut his eyes. Something hard whacked his knuckles. A sweaty-faced Chicago policeman with a long billy was glowering at him.

  “No loitering. I catch you at it again, you’ll enjoy a night of city hospitality.” Paul nodded and hurried away from the copper. His knuckles hurt. He walked south, toward the Levee, filled with bitterness, despair.

  Still, he had the prospect of a good career; Wex Rooney and Shadow together had given him that. He could have a lot of girls, except the one he wanted. Hadn’t Magda at Die goldene Tür told him it would be so? “Life has a funny way of pulling tricks like that, Pauli …”

  He would go on. Life might play tricks, but it demanded you endure them; that was a basic duty you faced every morning when you awoke. If your dreams turned to dross, if your family banished you, if you lost the person you loved, and all hope of finding your heart’s true resting place … you went on. But God, it hurt.

  76

  Elstree

  THE PRIVATE RAILROAD CAR Pride of Petoskey hurtled east in the late summer dark, attached to the crack overnight express of the New York Central. The huge car had been built by Pullman, under the direction of Elstree’s father. The name came from the popular summer community where the Elstrees had once maintained a home. With the social compass swinging wildly from year to year—now Newport, now Saratoga, now Tuxedo—the family had given up Michigan for the newest summer gathering place of the haut monde, Southampton Village on the south shore of Long Island. Elstree looked forward to spending his honeymoon at the family’s estate on the ocean.

  He smoked a small cigar while he lingered over a demitasse of dark, bitter coffee. Coffee prepared, as were all things in his life, exactly as he ordered. He sat at the four-person dining table in the open area toward the rear of the car. On either side he could see himself in profile. To his left, in the window with its half-
height curtains, the image was sharp. To the right, across the aisle, there was a dimmer, muddier reflection in a panel of the highly buffed rosewood used throughout the car.

  From behind him came the soft swish and clink of Melton’s hands in the galley dishpans. Melton was cleaning up after the wedding supper served while the train sped across northern Indiana. Melton was sixty-two, black; he slept in a narrow bunk adjoining the galley. Under the bunk a generator juttered away day and night, providing the soft electric light from the car’s elaborate fixtures.

  The forward section of the car consisted of a large bedroom and separate water closet. Occupants of the bedroom entered or left by a door at either end. All doors on the car could be key-locked. The rabble riding trains to which the Pride of Petoskey was attached had no access to Elstree’s private world of convenience.

  He was growing impatient. He took his monocle from his eye and polished it with a linen napkin decorated with the family crest, white on white. He laid the monocle aside and finished his coffee. Then he moved to one of two large swivel chairs bolted to the floor through a Persian carpet of muted design. Like all good Victorian domiciles, this small apartment on wheels was crowded with chairs, both leather and plush, ottomans, expensive little taborets, rubber plants and potted palms, cigar stands, china dogs, small bookcases, wicker hampers for magazines and papers, even a compact pipe organ.

  Elstree saw none of it. His eye remained fixed on the door to the bedroom. Juliette had locked herself in there directly after she finished her slice of white wedding cake frosted with a strawberry glacé. It was assumed she was preparing herself for her husband. Did this take the better part of an hour?

  Melton appeared. He was arthritic and inclined to hobble. “Mist’ Elstree sir, will you be requiring anything else tonight?”

  “No, Melton, thank you. Splendid dinner.”

  “ ’Preciate that, sir. A privilege to serve you, as always. Once again, congratulations. I’ll retire now.”

  “I don’t hear the mutt anymore.” Juliette had insisted on bringing along her damned dog Rudy. He’d yapped all through the meal, locked up in Melton’s cubicle.

  “No, sir, he’s sleepin’ in his little basket. I like havin’ him in there with me.”

  Elstree waved at cigar smoke floating around his head. “Raise one of those windows about an inch, will you? In the morning, you may knock with coffee about eight.”

  “Yes, sir, Mist’ Elstree. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Melton raised the window; the noise of the train and rushing air grew louder, and a draft rapidly dispersed the cigar smoke. Melton disappeared. Elstree’s gaze was on the rosewood door again. From where he sat, he could count the small square inlays that created a Grecian urn in the center panel. A hundred and forty-six. He’d already counted them twice.

  He adjusted his patterned silk robe over the knees of his lounging pajamas. His carpet slippers were velvet, embroidered, like his robe and pajamas, with the family crest. He crossed his legs; uncrossed them. He fought a yawn. The day had been long and tiring, as he’d expected. It had also been disconcerting, which he hadn’t expected. Juliette’s mother had raised a suspicion that continued to bedevil him.

  The morning ceremony at St. James Church had proceeded without incident. At the altar, flanked by gigantic arrangements of roses and lilies, orchids and artificial orange blossoms, Elstree and his nineteen-year-old bride said their vows. At the conclusion, he planted a chaste kiss on Juliette’s cool lips, virtually without a response.

  From the church, the bride and groom, relatives, and invited guests returned to the Vanderhoff mansion. There were three hundred guests, the absolute capacity of the house. The reception could have been held in the ballroom on the second floor, but Nell Vanderhoff wouldn’t have it. Snotty little Ward McAllister, who originated New York’s “Four Hundred” phrase, derided Chicagoans for their upstairs ballrooms.

  Furniture from the mansion’s main floor had been put in temporary storage in a warehouse to create space for the wedding buffet and silver champagne fountains. While Maestro Theodor Thomas and a half dozen of his finest string players serenaded the guests from a corner of the conservatory, everyone gorged on oysters and littleneck clams, caviar with toast points, cold asparagus and cold sliced pheasant, Camembert cheese and Turkish coffee, strawberries dipped in chocolate, and a dozen other uncommon delicacies. Nell Vanderhoff had banned pork in any form.

  Nell hovered near her new son-in-law during the early part of the tedious three-hour affair. Elstree acknowledged that Nell was a rich woman, and socially important, but he didn’t like her. First, she was sickly; she made a career of her illnesses and discussion of them. Further, she presided over the reception with an objectionable false sweetness. She told Elstree how lucky he was to marry her daughter. “Throughout Juliette’s whole life, I’ve taken special care of her beauty, and particularly her hair.”

  “Yes, it’s lovely,” Elstree agreed, looking around.

  “Juliette is an unsullied child, William.” Nell’s voice was pitched low. “Completely unsullied. Please take that into consideration.”

  “Oh, yes, Mother Vanderhoff, I will.”

  Twice more during the reception Nell sought him out to repeat essentially the same message, to be certain he understood. Or at least he assumed that to be her purpose, until the third time, when a sudden suspicion assailed him. She used a certain word once too often.

  Well, he thought as he stared through the window at the featureless dark of Ohio, he’d have the truth out of his bride before he exercised his rights. This determination showed in the set of his mouth, the gleam in his eye as he sat smoking another small cigar and counting, counting the rosewood inlays …

  The Pride of Petoskey swayed and clicked over the rails. Air blowing through the partially open window rattled the palm fronds. Still, when it came, Elstree clearly heard the sound he’d been awaiting. The turn of the key on her side of the door.

  Inviting him in.

  He was stiff with expectation. He wanted to see her shiny black hair unbound; see her slim body bared for his eyes. But first he must clear up the suspicion planted by Nell’s use of that one word three times.

  Elstree seized the twenty-four-karat gold handle of the rosewood door. He wrenched it down with a motion both rough and urgent.

  How lovely she looked. How lovely, and shyly frightened, standing by the foot of the double bed they would share.

  She’d washed her face clean of rouge and powder. She smelled fresh, of lilac water. She hadn’t yet removed all her clothes. Under a sheer robe of peach silk he saw her pink brocaded corset, trimmed with lace at the bodice and ribbons at the shoulders. Her legs were stunningly shapely in mauve stockings; on her right knee was a white garter. Color rushed into his cheeks.

  “My dear, you’re an altogether ravishing bride.” He bent to kiss and inhale the warm scented curve between her throat and shoulder. She pulled away.

  Annoyed, he too stepped back. She’d brought her champagne glass to the bedroom, he noticed. There it stood on the dressing table, among her cosmetic pots. Empty. Had she drunk it for courage?

  “Dear Mrs. Elstree,” he said. “You look troubled. On this night of all nights? It shouldn’t be.”

  “Bill, before we—Bill, there’s something I have to confess to you.”

  Like a goblin, sickly little Nell loomed in his imagination. Her ugly red lips repeatedly mouthed the word “unsullied.”

  “A guilty secret? You? I can’t believe it.”

  “Please don’t joke. This is difficult enough.”

  “All right, then, out with it.”

  Julie turned away. Raised a brocaded window blind. She watched a few lonely lights, a country hamlet, flash by. He watched her anguished reflection in the glass.

  “My mother wanted me to deceive you about something. I mean deceive you here, tonight. I don’t know how she proposed that I do it, I never listened to her scheme, I shut out the words whenever she
tried to explain …”

  Icy with outrage, a sense of being a victim, he said, “Continue.”

  To her credit, she squared her shoulders and hugged the silk night robe across her bosom and looked straight at him with her stunning gray eyes as she spoke. “I’ve had—a previous experience. I’m not what the romance novels would call—”

  “Unsullied?”

  His ferocity stunned her. Her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Well?”

  “Yes, that’s what I had to confess to you. A man expects certain things in the woman he marries. You’ve been so gentle and considerate, so decent throughout the courtship—” Rather smugly, Elstree smiled. “I can’t be dishonest about—what you’re getting.”

  Elstree had chosen Juliette Vanderhoff because she was one of the most stimulating females he’d ever met. Not stimulating in a cheap way, like some of his tarts from the Levee. Her attraction lay in her youth, freshness, chaste air. A large part of his reward for the whole tedious courtship, dancing attendance on her whining mother, her stupid parvenu father, was this moment when he would be the one to take her virginity.

  Which was nonexistent.

  He struggled to control his raging emotions and maintain a calm tone.

  “Who was this man?”

  “It isn’t relevant, Bill.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not going to reveal that.”

  He almost hit her. “You understand this alters our whole relationship.”

  “I should think it alters it for the better. Honesty is always—”

  “Honesty? I don’t give a God damn for honesty. If you’re secondhand goods, you’re no better than a street whore.”

  “But it was only once.”

  “Once or a thousand times, it’s all the same. I no longer have any reason to treat you with respect. Take off your clothes.”

  “Bill—William—please. You’ve been so gentle and kind all these months—all the time I was making up my mind—I thought you’d understand.”