The Americans, Page 2

  He could hardly count all the things he’d long for. The great metal tea kettle, big enough to hold over two hundred gallons of water, that hung in front of the Oriental Tea Company on Court Street. The convivial meetings of his two literary clubs, the Saturday Club and St. Botolph’s. The animated conversation of the members of the Ladies’ Visiting Committee who frequently met at the Kent house; Julia was on the charitable society’s board of managers.

  He’d miss the equestrian statue of Washington at the entrance to the Public Garden. The tower clock, and the noise of trains shuttling in and out of Providence Station. The sight of the glowing beacon atop the Custom House; the smells of the flower and vegetable shows at Horticultural Hall; the taste of the hot rolls at the Parker House hotel—

  Of course he’d have to give it all up one of these days. The months kept racing by. Much faster than they had when he was young, it seemed. There would come a moment—perhaps sooner than expected—when he would have no more time.

  And who would lead the family?

  Gideon Kent loved his daughter, his son, and his stepson. That didn’t prevent him from recognizing the problems each one faced. Problems which might well prevent them from carrying on the family’s tradition.

  Eleanor, for example, was preoccupied by the demands of her profession. She was an actress—which automatically barred her from full respectability for the rest of her life. She was currently being courted by a member of her troupe, a young Jewish actor whom she’d known for some years. If she wanted to fall in love with a Jew, that was her business. But Gideon understood the temperament of a good number of Americans. Should Eleanor’s liaison become a permanent one, it could lead to difficulties. Perhaps heartbreaking ones.

  There was something else about Eleanor that disturbed Gideon. A secret hurt he believed she’d suffered on the night in 1877 when his New York mansion had been invaded by a mob of roughnecks. His first wife, Margaret, had died that night. And something had happened to his daughter. Something about which she never spoke. But it had scarred her, of that he was positive.

  Then there was his younger child, Will. A vigorous boy, Will would be fourteen this year. He had an innate decency and a trusting nature, but he thought poorly of himself. Gideon saw evidence of that almost every day.

  Will’s lack of confidence left Gideon feeling inadequate as a father. Inadequate and guilty. The guilt was heightened every time he tried to bolster his son’s faith in himself. He never succeeded. Gideon feared that, left uncorrected, Will’s feeling of inferiority could blight his life.

  Will’s relationship with Julia’s son, Carter, bothered Gideon, too. Carter had been a companion for Will at a time when Will most needed one. But now the younger boy had become dependent on the older. And Carter wasn’t exactly an ideal model for anyone’s character.

  Oh, he had good qualities. He was intelligent, and certainly not without courage. But he tended to glibness, he was headstrong, and he had a calculating streak. His father, Louis Kent, had been a Civil War profiteer, an unashamed opportunist all his life. Gideon detected signs of a similar disposition in Louis’s son.

  Furthermore, Carter’s tendency to resist authority made his school career a disaster. Only repeated intervention on Gideon’s part had prevented his dismissal from preparatory school, the exclusive Adams Academy out in Quincy. Now Carter was barely hanging on at Harvard. He hadn’t survived the social winnowing which traditionally took place during the sophomore year; he hadn’t been chosen for the first of the clubs by means of which a student made his way up the school’s invisible social ladder. Of course the fault was in part Gideon’s; all the prominent families that sent sons to Harvard knew of what Gideon mentally referred to as the McAllister Incident.

  Academically, things were even worse for Carter. He was having particular trouble with a professor of German, a bad-tempered fellow whose dictatorial manner clashed with Carter’s dislike of any and all rules. The professor was determined to see him dismissed from the college—or so Carter claimed.

  In his own way, Gideon loved Eleanor, and Will, and Carter. But that love hadn’t prevented him from losing faith in the ability of the three young people to hold the family together in the years ahead. None of the three showed the slightest interest in the ideals by which several generations of Kents had tried to live. Eleanor was too busy. Carter was too reckless and irresponsible. And Will— the one among them who might offer the best hope of leadership—Will’s character was being warped by his low self-esteem, and his worship of his stepbrother.

  How shameful of me to think so poorly of them.

  Yet Gideon was powerless to do anything else. And he couldn’t explain away his loss of faith by reminding himself that as people grew older, they always developed a skepticism of the young, thus acting out one of the eternally recurring patterns of human life.

  With a start, he realized he’d reached the waterfront. Down a dark lane, a concertina squeaked faintly. To his right, he heard petticoats rustling but couldn’t see the whore because of the fog. Ahead, men bellowed a chantey behind sulfurous-looking windows of bottle glass. The singing came from a notorious dive called the Red Cod. Every week or so, someone got knifed or beaten there.

  He walked slowly out along a pier. There were at least two hundred such piers in Boston now. But many of the oldest ones were gone, including Griffin’s Wharf where Philip Kent had gathered the tea which was kept in the small green bottle that stood on a mantel at home. Griffin’s had been buried by the landfill that had expanded the city along the waterfront and the Back Bay.

  A steam tug chugged out on the water, its engines at dead slow and its bell ringing a constant warning. Its running lights were barely visible in the heavy fog. Amid the reek of fish and cordage, Gideon stood shivering in the dank air. Europe, the family’s homeland, lay out there somewhere. But it was hidden.

  Just like the tug—

  Just like the future.

  Fear surged through him. Fear that the family traditions would wither, the family’s dedication to principle evaporate in the climate of materialism settling over America—

  He shivered again. Despite the mildness of the evening, his hands and legs had grown cold and stiff. He rubbed his upper arms and stamped his feet. The pilings of the pier creaked.

  Could he somehow change things? He wasn’t sure. He feared there were already forces at work too powerful for him to overcome.

  But he had to overcome them, struggle against them until he set each of the younger Kents on the right road—.

  Tonight, it was hard for him to feel any confidence in his ability to do that. In this cold, forlorn place, his spirits had sunk to their lowest point in a long time.

  Suddenly a dart of pain pierced the center of his chest. Pierced and spread outward, toward the edges of his breastbone. The pain quickly became a tight constriction, a heavy weight pushing against him. He had trouble getting his breath. For the ten or fifteen seconds in which the pain persisted he was terrified.

  When it passed, his cheeks were bathed with sweat. What was the cause of the pain? Was he going to be struck down by the same kind of heart seizure that had killed his father, Jephtha Kent, at a relatively young age?

  He couldn’t permit that to happen. Not with the family in its present state of disarray. Upset and anxious, he gazed to the east. What would Philip have done? Old Philip, that self-assured, faintly truculent man who stared out from the ornate picture frame in Gideon’s study.

  From the dark and the fog hiding the Atlantic, no answer came.

  God forgive him for having lost faith in the younger Kents and their ability to take command of the future, instead of letting it take command of them. The hopelessness was growing in him like a disease: He knew the real reason for it. The children weren’t to blame; he was. He had lost faith in himself. He had lost faith in his own ability to stop or redirect forces already in motion—

  Sudden footsteps. He turned and saw an old seaman outlined against the light of
a tavern door: the Red Cod again. The door had been opened so that two men could throw a third out into the fog. His chin struck the cobbles and Gideon heard the snap of a bone breaking. The men inside shut the door with a muffled bang. The darkness hid the man lying motionless, and the old seaman too. But Gideon heard the latter’s drink-slurred voice address him.

  “Ye don’t look like ye belong in this part of town, mate. Are ye lost?”

  Gideon chuckled, a hard, humorless sound. “Completely.”

  “Can I help ye out?”

  “By God I wish you could. Thank you anyway.”

  Gideon walked by the old man and headed back in the direction of the city. His words, spoken quietly but with the fervor of desperation, made the old seaman scratch his head and stare after him long after Gideon’s form was lost in the fog.

  Book One

  THE CHAINS OF THE PAST

  CHAPTER I

  AT THE RED COD

  i

  OF ALL THE WATERFRONT dives in Boston, none looked meaner or dingier inside than the Red Cod—and none was more dangerous.

  The place catered to the rough men who worked the fishing boats, and to others who cleaned, cut up, and packed ice around the fish the boats brought back. There was also a smaller group of patrons even more reckless and amoral than the first two. These were the men and women who lived off the fishermen and the packing house workers.

  It was a female in this smaller group whom Carter Kent had decided to visit tonight. The visit was possible only because Carter had hoarded his allowance for several weeks. Like many parents of young men at Harvard, Gideon was generous with his stepson—perhaps overly generous. Carter often thought with great amusement that if his stepfather knew how the so-called pocket money was being spent, there would be no more of it.

  Unlike Gideon, Carter did not go to the docks for peace and contemplation, but for excitement and physical gratification. He liked the Red Cod because it was so distinctly different from his college surroundings. There was an air of casual disregard of the law, a refreshing contrast to the discipline under which he suffered as a student. He found the atmosphere of barely suppressed violence exciting, though he was well aware that it was risky for Harvard men to set foot in the tavern. Few did. Even his friend Willie Hearst, who also had a liking for excitement, didn’t come down to this part of the city.

  Tonight—Washington’s birthday, 1883—the Red Cod seemed unusually crowded. The stench of sweat, beer, gin, and fish hit Carter like a bludgeon as he stepped inside, feeling, as always, the quickening of his pulse that accompanied a visit here.

  The tavern was noisy and the constant calls for service almost uniformly profane. The landlord, a graying runt named Phipps, looked annoyed by the commotion. When he recognized Carter, his gaze grew even more sullen.

  Carter slid past a table of rowdies to an old deacon’s bench that had just been vacated near the smoky fireplace. At a table behind the bench and close to a little-used side door sat Tillman, an obese fisherman who worked for Carter’s sometime drinking companion, Captain Eben Royce. Tillman waved his battered pewter mug. Carter grinned and returned the greeting. Phipps, meantime, came out from behind his serving counter with three tankards in each hand. “One side, one side, you damned lazy louts.”

  Carter spied the serving girl he hoped to engage for a few minutes later on to relieve the tension that had built up recently. Josie was illiterate, and rather stout, but still in her twenties, and good-natured. She had breasts of positively amazing dimensions. She was displaying them by leaning over while she served a table in back. Carter saw the redness of a nipple showing above the line of her none too clean blouse.

  She in turn saw Carter watching, and smiled. Phipps gave his girls time to make a quick dollar or two, and in return for his generosity he collected a portion of their earnings.

  A number of patrons gave Carter surly, even hostile looks. At twenty-one, he was a broad-shouldered, handsome young man with jet black hair and eyes. His skin had a swarthy cast—a heritage from his paternal grandfather, an officer in the Mexican army. His coloring might have induced some to take him for one of the Portuguese fishermen who frequented the tavern, except that he didn’t move or speak like a sailor; his upbringing in a wealthy household gave him a certain polish and grace he couldn’t entirely disguise. And although he always wore old clothes to the Red Cod, they were cleaner and neater than those of the other patrons.

  He reached the high-backed bench and dragged it across the dirty floor to a place immediately next to the fire. He was chilled. It had been a long walk down from Beacon Street, through streets wet with the melting of last night’s heavy snow. Phipps, on his way back to the serving area, passed close to Carter just as he moved the bench. The landlord reacted with a loud exclamation.

  “Leave the damn furniture where I put it, boy.”

  Carter’s face darkened. He knew Phipps wouldn’t have picked on him if he were one of the regulars. Phipps despised Harvard students. Last fall, several of them had come in, ostensibly for ale, and had uncorked bottles of bugs especially collected for the occasion. Even the patrons of the Cod, who were familiar with vermin of all sorts, still talked of the prank. The bugs had numbered in the hundreds—the count depended on the source—and Phipps had been violently antagonistic toward the college crowd ever since.

  Still, Carter automatically resented the order. Then he remembered what sort of place he was in, and smiled the bright, charming smile that was one of his few assets.

  “Mr. Phipps, I’m damn near numb from the trip down here. Can’t hurt to let me sit by your fire a min—”

  “Leave it where I put it!” Phipps shoved him aside and then pushed the bench back to its original position. Chairs scraped, heads turned, and men snickered at Carter’s expense.

  Anger consumed him then. But instead of giving in to it, as he wanted to do, he had the good sense to call on his only real talent, one he’d discovered years before. He had a certain quickness of mind and facility with words which made it easy for him to speak persuasively. And he had that charming smile, which somehow gave credibility to even his most outrageous statements.

  “What a thing to do to a frozen patron—especially in this city and on this day!” he said with a grin, quite aware of the splintered bung starter Phipps kept in his belt. The landlord was resting his hand on it, as if hoping to find an excuse to use it on his young customer. But Carter’s remark confused him.

  “This day?” Phipps repeated, blinking.

  “The first president’s birthday! Old George fought for freedom, and on his birthday, in the town that was the very cradle of liberty, I should think a man would be free to move a bench a few inches when he’s frozen his ass to come here and give you his money. Seems to me you’re not a very proper, liberty-loving American, Mr. Phipps.”

  The glibness of the words caught the fancy of some of the previously hostile patrons, who laughed and applauded.

  “He’s got you there, Phippsy!”

  “Let Harvard put his bench where he wants it.”

  Phipps eyed the crowd, and Carter, with disgust.

  “Ah, do it, then.” He pivoted away.

  Carter kept that glowing smile in place and executed a mock bow to the man. “President Washington thanks you, and so do I”—he was bent over at the bottom of the bow, and thus his face was hidden from the landlord as he added in a whisper—“you ignorant jackass.”

  Suddenly he blinked. That was it. The solution he’d been seeking for weeks—ever since it had become clear that his nemesis, Eisler, would give him failing marks this year, too. In this distinctly unlikely setting, old Phipps had inadvertently triggered the answer to Carter’s problem.

  Royce’s fat cohort, Tillman, congratulated him on winning the battle of the bench. Carter grinned again, thanked him and sat down, barely able to contain a new kind of excitement. The scheme for revenge had jumped full-blown into his mind. His friend Willie, one year his junior but already a connoisseur
of pranks, would love it. The only question was— did Carter have the money and the nerve to carry it off?

  ii

  He’d completely forgotten Josie. He realized it when he felt her big breast pressing against his right shoulder; she had come up beside him at the end of the bench, feigning a pout.

  “Hello, Carter my sweet. I thought you’d come to see me, an’ then all at once, you looked a hundred miles off.”

  He grinned and pulled her down on his knee. He ran his hand up beneath her skirt—she never wore drawers—and fondled her.

  “Ah, that feels lovely,” she laughed, wiggling. “But you know Phippsy don’t allow samplin’ of the goods.”

  “He doesn’t allow much of anything,” Carter grumbled, withdrawing his hand.

  She giggled again. “You showed him up good. That tongue of yours is a wicked instrument.”

  “Of course you speak from experience—”

  She batted at his nose in feigned anger. In an age in which the stern and upright British queen set the moral tone for the entire Western world, tavern sluts liked to mock their upper-class counterparts; this Josie proceeded to do with elaborate gestures, sniffs, and grimaces. But she hadn’t the talent to carry it off more than a few seconds, and Carter soon grew bored.

  “I mustn’t be too annoyed with Phippsy. He gave me a splendid idea for getting back at Eisler.”

  “That German still giving you fits, is he?”

  “He’s out for my balls—academically speaking, of course.”

  Again she laughed. “Trouble with you, sweet—you can’t stand to have anybody tell you what to do.”

  “You’ve discovered that, eh?” He bussed her cheek. “Well, that may be. On the other hand, Eisler can’t do anything but tell people what to do—” Suddenly dejection overcame him. “I really don’t belong in that damn college, Josie. I don’t know whether I’m more inept scholastically or socially.”