The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  In 1812, while British and American gunboats battled and sank each other on the Great Lakes, Mathieu Latoledan died of a “coughing sickness” and was succeeded by his son, David Latoledan. When David assumed the throne he was twenty-seven years old. When he relinquished it in 1872 he was eighty-nine, and during his lifetime the Kingdom would achieve its greatest period of glory, making the Latoledan family among the five hundred richest in North America.

  David’s father, Mathieu, had been an odd combination of fron tiersman and aristocrat. Although he had spent most of his adult life in the New World, he could still remember the old family estate in France. David, on the other hand, never saw France as a child, and, growing up in the Ohio wilderness, he had learned a pioneer’s sense of entrepreneurial independence.

  For David, the difference between running a business and governing a country lay solely in the titles men used. Understanding that in the modern world wealth was power, he pushed for the Kingdom’s economic growth above all else, striking deals with the United States that helped to fill the family coffers at the expense of the Kingdom’s political autonomy. He sold territory in the Free Estate to foreign investors, and gave land to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as part of a deal to construct rail lines to Toledo (although due to financial difficulties the route was never completed).

  Such concessions to the United States helped promote rapid development in the Free Estate, as in the years following 1816 the Ohio country was transformed by intrepid industrialists from a wilderness into an endlessly profitable source of raw materials to fuel American enterprise. In 1820, David changed the family name from Latoledan to Toledo (after the capital city)—“it has an American sound,” he explained in a letter to a friend in Philadelphia.20 This action was not without basis; in the political climate of the United States during the late nineteenth century, newfound nationalist sentiment ran high and foreign origins were a source of suspicion.

  Of his two children, David took a great deal more interest in his older son (and presumed heir), Claudius, than in his younger offspring, Louis. From an early age, David groomed Claudius for the throne and involved him in the daily operations of the Kingdom; Claudius practiced his mathematics by calculating shipping prices down the Maumee River, and at harvesttime supervised the gathering and storage of the corn. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Oxford for his continuing education and remained in Europe for the next six years before returning to Ohio to take part in the administration of the Toledo family’s concerns.

  Louis’s childhood was rather different, and far more typical of a young man of his social standing: sent to boarding schools in Boston for most of his youth, he felt little connection with Ohio or the Free Estate. After graduating from secondary school, Louis was sent to McGill College, in Montreal, where he studied for a bachelor of letters. Kept distant from the business of the Kingdom, his interests turned to the arts—specifically, he became an admirer of the Romantic poets and landscape painting. At McGill, he concluded his graduation speech with the words “I can think of no more heroic example of all that is good and true and manly, that to which we ought all aspire, than that of Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

  In 1837, in an effort to gain recognition for his tiny empire, David held a festival to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Kingdom (in reality, it was the sixty-first), to which he invited wealthy families from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as the governor of Ohio, several congressmen, the Prince of Wales, and President Andrew Jackson.

  Preparations for the event were extensive, and David spared no expense to give the impression to his guests that they were being entertained by a head of state every bit as legitimate as the crowns of Europe. Two dozen musicians and more than a hundred cases of champagne were imported from New York, and a baker and five chefs from Boston. Although the Prince of Wales himself declined to come, the British Consul of New York, Lord Charles Porpington, bore the prince’s greetings to the festivities and drank champagne with David by the banks of Swan Creek in a gazebo lit with oil lamps that had been strung from the trees. In a letter to the prince, Porpington wrote: “There is something magical about that place which, for all its roughness, will always remain wonderful to me.”21 However, neither President Jackson nor any member of Congress attended or made response to the event at all.

  Over the following decades, the political and practical significance of the Kingdom diminished rapidly, even as its wealth increased. Culturally and politically, the identity of the Kingdom was fading fast. As one historian put it, life within the Kingdomhad long since become identical to that of the surrounding United States. Its effective borders shrank steadily in the face of growing U.S. settlement and influence. . . . By 1865, the Kingdom was essentially reduced to the Toledo family themselves, their mansion and grounds, and the businesses in their immediate vicinity, which made much of being “by appointment of the Crown.” It had contracted to a rough square, six city blocks on each side.22

  In 1866, an aging David Toledo stepped down from the practical administration of the Kingdom to let Claudius, then thirty-seven years old and still unmarried, assume the reins of power. For reasons that are not entirely clear—perhaps feeling that his brother’s dilettante existence, wandering the salons of Paris and London, was a discredit to the family—Claudius asked Louis to return to Toledo in 1867, creating a sinecure post for him with the title of “Minister of Social Advancement.”

  Moved by the lofty sound of this office, Louis returned to Ohio and began a number of cultural ventures including the founding of the Toledo Symphony and the Toledo Museum of Art.23

  On May 10, 1869, the transcontinental railway was completed, the two coasts bound together by a golden spike driven into the ties at Promontory Point, Utah. In practical terms, under the competent guidance of Claudius, the Kingdom of Ohio was wealthier and more prosperous than ever before. Symbolically, however, I can’t help but see this event as a final nail in the coffin of the Free Estate. Around the tiny Kingdom, the United States had grown together and closed in on all sides, sealing off any possible route of escape.24

  Finally—to conclude this brief history—in 1894, the United States government finally put an end to the upstart frontier empire. A division of U.S. Army troops marched into Toledo, sparking a battle that would cost dozens of lives and culminated in a fire that destroyed the Latoledan mansion. According to all reliable accounts, the last two remaining members of the royal family perished in this blaze.

  SHE SITS on a wooden stool in a corner of the subway workshop, huddled beside the feeble glow of the stove. Her breath steams in the cold air of the room, windows opaque with frost—the dingy space and the barn of machinery beyond abandoned on a Friday night, gathering shadows pushed back only by the glow of embers through the iron grate. She watches silently, feeling helpless and out of place, as the mechanic sets a pot of water on the stove to boil.

  “Make us some tea,” he clarifies. “Can’t light a lantern, the company has guards that patrol . . .”

  She murmurs words of gratitude, surveying the workshop as Peter bustles back and forth.

  “Have you worked on the subway long?” she asks, awkwardly trying to make conversation.

  “Couple months now.” Feeling suddenly at a loss for what to do or say in her presence, he distracts himself with tugging the window latches more securely shut and banking the coals of the fire. Finally he forces himself to sit on an overturned bucket at the edge of the fire’s glow, acutely aware of the distance between their bodies. “So, you’re from Ohio?”

  “Yes. From Toledo, to be exact.”

  “I’ve never been to Ohio. Grew up in Idaho. Ever heard of Coeur d’Alene?”

  “A silver town.” She tries to imagine the place, vaguely picturing endless forest and wild men on horseback. “I remember reading about it in the newspaper. I think it was called a town of lost money and loose women.” She smiles at him—then realizes her own tactless clumsiness and looks away, cheeks flushing. />
  “Maybe so.” He stares down at his scarred boots. “Doesn’t matter much, anyway. All in the past now.” He pauses. “What about you? What was it like, growing up in Ohio?”

  “Pleasant. It is a beautiful place.” She closes her eyes, a weight of exhaustion descending over her like a heavy woolen cloak. At this moment she feels utterly alone: she feels as if she is floating in a void, both her memories and these present surroundings more distant than the moon.

  “And what you were saying about that House of Toledo?” He leans toward her, struggling to put together a question that might give him some clue about who she is, what she’s looking for—anything, really. “That’s your family?”

  “Yes. It was my family, the royal family of Ohio. My father was Louis Toledo, the king.”

  Peter opens his mouth but then realizes the obvious next question doesn’t exist, or maybe there are too many of them. The pot on the stove starts to rattle and he rises, wiping off a pair of metal mugs with his sleeve and adding dried leaves from a rusty canister. He pours the water and hands her one, and she clasps the hot drink with both hands, letting the steam bathe her face.

  “And, this . . .” Peter trails off. After the German restaurant, when they first arrived here, he had imagined what might happen between them, two strangers in the New York night. But now, the small distance between where they sit feels like an impossible chasm.

  “This place you grew up,” he tries, “it was in the woods, in the wilderness?”

  She shakes her head. “By the time I was born, the woods had been cleared and become farmers’ fields. I spent my early years in Ohio, and then, after my mother’s death when I was eleven, I was sent first to a boarding school in Connecticut, and later to Europe for several years.” Phrases that sound somehow unreal in her own ears, describing an imaginary person.

  “And what was Tesla like?” Peter asks. He still doesn’t believe her story, but he has stopped thinking of it as a lie, exactly. Instead, he has begun to regard her words more like a tall tale, along the lines of the ones his father sometimes told, the legends of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

  “Difficult. Brilliant. Egotistical—perhaps with justification.” Maybe she blushes a little, but it’s hard to tell: the light in the workshop is dim, the ghosts of traffic flickering through the ice-fogged windows. “I must thank you again for helping me.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Then neither of them says anything for a time, each wrapped in separate silence.

  “We should get some sleep,” he says finally.

  “Sleep sounds like a paradise to me.”

  “I—” he hesitates. “I have to sleep here as well, you know. The equipment . . .” Which is not entirely a falsehood.

  She nods and he rises.

  “There’s a couple cots in the back, and blankets. I’ll get them.”

  Peter leaves the workroom for the dim expanse of the machinery barn beyond. There, leaning against the door and surveying the dark shapes of engines and furnaces, he feels a weight of weariness and nerves. Although he’d been eager for her company a few hours ago, now he wishes that he could be alone to collect himself, to digest her story—this fairy tale of lost worlds, famous inventors, and an impossible journey through time, all more than he can comprehend or even think clearly about, at this moment.

  Avoiding her face, he sets up the two cots, one at either end of the workroom. As she climbs into bed her dress shifts upward, revealing the shapely curve of her calves, and Peter’s heart catches for an instant. Noticing the direction of his gaze she averts her eyes, her cheeks burning, and quickly covers herself with the dusty blanket.

  Peter does the same and they both lie staring up at the ceiling in silence. The passing lights of wagon-lanterns and omnibuses, diffuse through the frosted windows; the dull, flickering shadows of machinery cast by the stove’s faint glow. The sound of slushing wheels, the white noise of the city—till, sooner or later, they sleep.

  CHAPTER V

  THE GREAT TRAP

  THE MORE WE STUDY, THE MORE WE DISCOVER OUR IGNORANCE.

  It was Shelley who wrote this, and although I never felt much kinship with that poet, I think he got this right. During these last decades I’ve lost count of the hours that I spent reading history, studying the why and how of the things that took place before and after our time together. And none of it, really, explains what happened in those moments.

  I picture you standing beside me in the dining room of a great house. The growing fear in your face, the way you wouldn’t meet my eyes but stared instead at the polished parquet floor. The stifling tension between us and my sense that you were about to speak, just before the butler entered with the silver coffee service on a tray . . .

  Even while these memories draw me in, they’re also painful to relive. Maybe that’s why it feels easier, some days, to lose myself in daydreams about a more distant past.

  Recently, in the public library, I found a book containing a portrait of Henri Latoledan by the Italian painter Cipriotto.25 It depicts a swarthy man with wide cheekbones and unruly black hair; wearing a velvet doublet and a short cape, he stares out of the painting with impenetrable eyes, seeming equally impatient with the artist recording his likeness and the viewer regarding it.

  Studying this image (after I smuggled the book home from the library—easy enough with a baggy coat and a bit of senile mumbling), I tried to imagine what it must have been like, for those first settlers who arrived in the wilderness that would become the Kingdom of Ohio. Sitting in my apartment (the room silent except for the avocado-colored fridge wheezing in one corner), I picture how they would have staggered to the edge of the lake that was their destination. The last of their wagons had shattered an axle in the woods days ago, and their possessions were piled on rough wooden platforms that they dragged behind them.

  While the women kindle campfires and unload sacks of flour and haunches of dried meat, the men hang sheets of canvas from the trees to form canopies, groaning as they lift their arms, their shoulders and palms locked from hours of gripping the sledges’ weight. It is evening, fireflies dancing beneath the dark branches and out over the water.

  When he has seen that all the motions of making camp are under way, Henri Latoledan steps away from the labor to visit his wife. He finds her seated in her tent, perched on a clothes chest and being fanned by her young chambermaid. Henri eyes the girl’s ripe curves before extending a hand toward his wife.

  She rises and they walk together in silence away from the half-built camp, to a point where the small waves of the lake lap a pebbled beach. A wall of oak and beech trees, ancient and immense, stands guard like a motionless army drawn up at the water’s edge, extending unbroken into the distance. A pale three-quarter moon has begun to climb in the sky, and the chirping of crickets fills the air. The hem of her long dress trails in the dirt and catches on twigs. In a moment of emotion, Henri takes her hand.

  “There,” he tells her, gesturing toward the forest. “Even as I told you it would be. One day soon a castle for you will rise here, and a new village.”

  “But Henri. But really . . .” She shakes her head, wondering as she has done every day since their departure whether this might be an elaborate nightmare, sent by God as some kind of test. They stand silently, side by side in their mud-stained velvet, surveying the horizon. Then he turns.

  “Now I must see to the camp.” He leads her back to her tent and checks the progress of the settlers—of his people, as he has already affectionately come to think of them: a motley band of brave or foolish souls from the village in France, a few more adventurers from the seaport in Marseilles, and a knot of silent Aca dian trappers whom he persuaded to join the expedition in Montreal. In all, some fifty men and women in the trackless wilderness. Henri is not even certain they have arrived at the place described on the deed and crude map in his saddlebag—but it does not matter, he reminds himself. Here, anything is possible.

  The encampment is goi
ng up well, he notes. Already the evening meal is cooking, the perishable baggage stowed away. A boy who worked as the fishmonger’s assistant in the old village has set baited lines in the lake and his valet is tending to the horses. Heft ing an ax, Henri sets to work chopping limbs from a fallen tree for firewood. Splinters cling to his beard and the front of his ruined doublet. One of his blisters bursts, dribbling pale fluid.

  He thinks that he has never been happier.

  The former town barber passes by, carrying his basin and shears, and Henri calls out to him.

  “Tell me, what do you think of our new home?”

  The barber shakes his ponderous head, grinning nervously. “It doesn’t look like France, my lord.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Here, give me your bowl.” Henri snatches the shaving basin and places it over his head, rapping the dented brass with his knuckles. “To protect myself from the wood chips,” he explains. The barber watches, wide-eyed. Noticing this look, Henri laughs.

  “Take good care of it, my lord,” the barber says reproachfully. “I’ll wager there’s not another like it for six hundred miles. And even in America men will need their beards shaved and their hair cut.” He glances affectionately at his scissors.