The Lawless Page 17

  The voice sounded miles away. Matt tore the envelope open. He was almost afraid to unfold the thin sheet inside, for fear there’d be terrible news.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve heard Paris is close to capitulation,” Whistler was saying as he bent from the waist and scrutinized various sections of the Matamoras canvas through his monocle. “Don’t suppose you care, but the Telegraph says there’ll be hell to pay. There’s talk of Bismarck’s jackbooted Dutchmen staging a surrender ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors, maybe. Or parading past the Arc de Triomphe—why, the Reds who claim the resistance was botched will have a field day. And every excuse to take over—Matty? You fall asleep on your feet?”

  Matt whispered, “Where’s Lahore in the Punjab?”

  “Northwest, I think. In the mountains. My grasp of geography’s about as complete as my understanding of silicon. Sending you greetings from there, is she?”

  Matt nodded. His face glowed with a strange kind of smile. Whistler didn’t know what to make of it. His young friend was either in a state of exaltation or about to bawl.

  Matt’s eyes were indeed a little damp. At last he knew the location of the military post where she was teaching.

  But he knew something far more important.

  —Thomas Matthew Kent came into the world with no difficulty on Christmas Day. He was early by almost a month but shows no ill effects and, oh dear Matt, I do think he already resembles you. You will think so too, one day when the time is right, and you see him—

  But when would that be? Months? Years

  “What’s that silly grin mean, Matty? It’s from Dolly, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Wanting to dance for joy, he grinned and handed the letter to his friend. Almost as if he were making a joke, he said, “Immortality.”

  For once the dapper artist was caught short. He scanned a line or two. “Oh, I see. Guess congratulations are in order. You’ve got a bastard running around—”

  This time it wasn’t embarrassment that made Matt redden. “He’s my legal son, Jim. Dolly and I are still married.”

  “Oh, sorry. No offense. Just don’t get carried away.” He pointed at the portrait. “That’s the only sort of immortality that matters, you know.”

  Less angrily but with complete conviction, Matt answered, “You’re wrong. She taught me that much.”

  But when will I see her again? And when will I see my son? He vowed he would somehow do both.

  He put his arm around his friend. “Let me get dressed and then we’ll go have something to drink. My treat.”

  “My Lord, it’s only ten in the morning! On the other hand, it’s damn fine weather for finding a snug fire and drinking a snootful.”

  “Sure is.”

  Matt’s voice broke when he thought of all she’d given him. The freedom to think—to create—without responsibility. She’d given him her love. And one other priceless gift every man wanted, deep in some timeless center of himself, when he began to think of the generations that would live after h? went to the dark.

  All at once he beamed. He sounded almost giddy with happiness.

  “I can paint a damn picture any day of the week. But it isn’t every day I have a son.”

  Interlude

  “And Thou Shalt Smite the Midianites as One Man”

  i

  ON THE FIRST warm weekend in June of the same year, the Reverend Jephtha Kent relinquished his pulpit to his assistant and traveled down to Long Branch to open the summer house. It was usually referred to as a cottage. The term was applied to all the homes along that increasingly fashionable section of the New Jersey shore, even the most opulent mansion.

  The Kent house was no mansion; it had a mere seven rooms. It stood about a hundred yards back from the high-tide line, facing the ocean. It occupied the south end of a row of cottages, and was by far the smallest of them.

  Jephtha had bought the place three years earlier, in 1868, feeling that his second wife, Molly, needed a refuge from the stench and clamor of New York summers. Although his duties as a Methodist pastor kept him in town during most of the warm weather, there was no need for Molly to suffer or to risk her health and perhaps her life. All the medical experts agreed disease was carried by the miasmas—the odors of garbage and waste that reached their ripest point in July and August.

  On this particular weekend, Molly had decided at the last moment to stay behind. She was suffering from a bad spring cold. She’d asked her husband to be sure to hire someone to help him with the work. One of the local boys he’d engaged a couple of times before. He murmured vague replies as he left, not lying but not exactly saying he would, either.

  Molly worried because Jephtha had been having some pains in his chest for the past couple of years. She’d finally pushed him into visiting a doctor. The physician had delivered a tedious lecture warning him to avoid undue exertion and the cigars which he admitted he puffed on the sly.

  Thus her concern over his doing manual work at the summer house was understandable. But when he reached Long Branch, his basically thrifty nature asserted itself and he decided not to hire a helper. It was foolish to squander money that way; money was too hard to come by. At certain times Jephtha Kent was wholly unable to comprehend and accept his status as a millionaire many times over. The weekend was one such time.

  He moved most of the summer furniture to the front veranda all by himself. Then, after nipping inside to smoke half of a good Havana, he began taking down the shutters. First the ones at ground level, then those on the upper story. The longer he worked, feeling only minimally winded, the more convinced he became that Molly’s fears were groundless, and the doctor’s warnings merely the cluckings of a professional hen. Except for the occasional pains he experienced—severe enough, all right, but not very frequent—he felt fit.

  He looked it, too. At fifty-one, despite the streaks of white in his long, straight black hair, he fooled many people into believing he was five or ten years younger. His parishioners joked about him resembling an Indian, and for good reason. His mother had been a fine Shoshoni woman named Grass Singing.

  As he was removing a second-floor shutter, the pain swept over him suddenly, constricted his chest, crushed it, as though a heavy weight had been dropped on him.

  His ears rang. He heard the hissing surf with unusual clarity, smelled the salt spray with unusual intensity. He swayed on the ladder, eight feet above the ground.

  He dropped the shutter but barely heard it thump in the weedy sand. He bent forward, clutching a rung to keep from tumbling off. Although he was frightened, prosaic thoughts flashed through his mind.

  You can’t do this. Murch is only expecting to take over for one week, and you know he hates preaching. The Reverend Murch was his assistant pastor.

  Finally the pain and then his fright passed. He managed to make his way down to the ground. He stood leaning against the ladder, breathing without the tight feeling under his breastbone or the spotty numbness in his left arm.

  Three small girls, ten or less, went scampering past the front of the house and on down the beach. They were carrying wooden buckets for crabbing. Their laughter faded. Then out of the sunny haze to the south came drumming hoofbeats. Jephtha saw a light, two-wheeled trap approaching. The mane of a splendid bay horse stood straight out in the wind.

  The driver wore a plug hat and duster. A cigar jutted from his mouth. A trail of smoke faded away behind him. Slowly his face took on definition.

  The man was in his late forties, with a graying chestnut beard and mustache, and a wart on his right cheek that became visible at closer range. His shoulders were slightly stooped, a trait of those who’d spent a great deal of time on horseback.

  Jephtha had met the man at a small reception given last June by one of the wealthier summer residents, the Philadelphia newspaper publisher George Childs. Jephtha had found the guest of honor a painfully shy man, and was somewhat surprised now when the man lifted his
plug hat to acknowledge that he recognized Jephtha.

  The trap went racing on up the beach, hidden by the veranda. Coming as it did on top of the pain, the sudden appearance of President Ulysses S. Grant put Jephtha Kent in an exceedingly bad mood.

  ii

  President Grant had chosen Long Branch as his family’s summer retreat. The sight or the thought of him usually depressed Jephtha. Of course he was somewhat ashamed of the reaction, but there was good reason for it.

  Theo Payne was the alcoholic editor-in-chief of the New York Union, the daily paper that was now back in the family along with Kent and Son, Boston, and Payne said Grant was unquestionably lost in the labyrinths of Washington politics.

  “He’s an honest man and expects others to be honest, which is part of his trouble. He’s constitutionally unable to distinguish between true friends and favor seekers who just flatter him. He’s the wrong man for the hour. We need a chief executive who’s a schemer—or at least can recognize one—because scheming’s the style down by the Potomac. Do you know what the cynics call the capital now? The auction room. Every man or woman with his or her price. Every one of them peddling something. Votes, influence, contracts, honor, physical favors—and the whole country’s starting to get into the same spirit.”

  Jephtha trudged around to the veranda. The slight effort tired him, which was both unusual and annoying. He picked up a book from a chair where he intended to do some reading later. He sat down with a loud sigh. It depressed him that he had so little faith in the current administration, since it had come into office on an almost unprecedented floodtide of optimism.

  Grant’s campaign slogan had been “Let us have peace.” People had expected him to end Republican factionalism and the political torment generated by the programs and personality of Andrew Johnson. People had expected him to set new, higher standards of morality in government. People had expected him to run a vigorous, effective administration because his war record proved he knew how to choose able lieutenants and put them to work. Grant would do this. Grant would do that. Grant would do everything and do it superbly.

  We Americans do have an unfortunate talent for expecting our chief executives to be kin to the Almighty, he thought. I’m as guilty as the next that way.

  And like millions of others, he had been cruelly disappointed by Grant’s performance to date.

  No one doubted the personal integrity of the Union’s greatest hero. But Grant’s judgment was in question only weeks after his election. He’d packed his cabinet with cronies and incompetent party hacks. Theo Payne maintained there were only two first-class men in major administration posts: Jake Cox of Ohio, who headed the Interior Department, and Hamilton Fish of New York, the Secretary of State.

  Last autumn the President’s judgment had become even more suspect. Jay Gould, a man who had entertained the President socially, had nearly cornered the United States gold market with the connivance of Grant’s own brother-in-law, a lobbyist named Abel Corbin. At the last moment the President had been alerted to the scheme and had ordered Treasury Secretary Boutwell to sell government gold to break Gould’s corner. But the national consciousness still held the memory of Black Friday, when the price of gold plummeted and speculators who’d followed Gould’s lead were wiped out. Grant had not been shrewd enough to detect the plot on his own.

  Lately it seemed to Jephtha that Theo Payne’s remark about the auction room was right. It seemed to him that a trend toward dishonesty was accelerating—and rapidly—everywhere from legislative chambers to private boardrooms. But what supposedly concerned the President most? According to Payne and his equally sarcastic colleagues, two things: keeping French cuisine off the White House table and people who told off-color stories out of his presence. Lincoln’s fondness for outhouse humor had been an all but unbearable cross for General Grant.

  Now, as President, he still knew a great deal about blooded horses, purebred bulldogs and quality cigars. He seemed to know little or nothing about how to control spoilsmen, especially those in his own Republican party.

  Of course corruption wasn’t confined to the Republicans. Anyone who lived under the control of the Tammany Democrats and their grand sachem, William March Tweed, knew that. For years, New York City and New York County had been bonanzas of boodle. The common council to which Tweed had first been elected had been jocularly referred to as the Forty Thieves. And that was in 1851.

  Under the genial Boss Tweed political swindling had been refined to an art, made possible because of the immense power Tweed had acquired. He dominated Democratic politics not only in the county but in the state. His handpicked men occupied the governor’s mansion and the chair of the speaker of the Assembly. He himself was a state senator, and it was said that nothing of consequence happened in Albany unless it was first approved in the Boss’s seven-room suite there.

  But he kept his local positions, too. Commissioner of the New York City schools. Assistant commissioner of streets. President of the board of supervisors. Using all his offices to advantage, Tweed and his cronies had mined a veritable Golconda of graft.

  The extent of that mining operation had lately been revealed in the Times, with some support from the Herald and the Union. Theo Payne was contemptuous of the small number of newspapers willing to attack the Boss. Payne said that the silence of at least eighty-nine other papers in the state, both dailies and weeklies, had been bought with fat advertising contracts arranged by Tweed.

  Still, certain papers had begun to print documentation of Tweed’s crimes. Appalling documentation. It seemed the Boss and his “ring” had really begun to function on a truly grand scale two years earlier. The ring’s other members were City Chamberlain Peter Sweeney, Comptroller Richard Connolly, and Mayor Oakley Hall. In ’69, they had apparently decreed that every invoice rendered to the city or county had to be fraudulently inflated by fifty percent. Lately, it was said, the amount was up to an incredible eighty-five percent. The boodle was divided five ways: one fifth to each of the four ringleaders, with the final one fifth going for assorted political payoffs and favors.

  The scope of Tweed’s thievery would have been amusing if it weren’t so appalling, Jephtha thought. The Boss had long since become a Murray Hill millionaire. He maintained a law office he seldom visited, but prestigious clients such as Jay Gould of the Erie paid the firm huge sums just to assure their right to do business locally. Railroad, insurance and ferry companies were required to patronize a printing house in which Tweed owned an interest. The Boss had become a director of numerous street railway and gas transmission companies without investing a cent of his own money.

  And if the newspaper revelations were true, the ring’s masterpiece, and its biggest source of revenue, was the new county courthouse being built of marble supplied by a Massachusetts quarry owned by—who else?—the Boss. The town was still agog over one story concerning courthouse graft. It had been documented that a plasterer named Garvey had routinely submitted bills for wages of $50,000 a day—and been paid. Mr. Garvey, this “prince of plasterers,” as the crusading editors called him, had earned a total of $2,807,464.06 in a single season of work! It was assumed that he shared most of his wealth with the ring.

  Now, however, a shamed public was beginning to respond to the Times stories, and to Thomas Nast’s relentless cartooning in Harper’s Weekly. There was talk of a mass meeting to demand legal action. It looked as if Bill Tweed’s heyday might be coming to an end. But that didn’t spell the end of local corruption, Jephtha was sure. It would continue to flourish with greater subtlety and less flagrant disregard for the law.

  Jephtha’s pessimism veered in a new direction as he fingered the book in his lap. It was one of his favorites: Innocents Abroad, the surprise bestseller of 1869. The author was a young Missouri-born journalist who was giving Artemus Ward stiff competition on the lecture platform. He wrote under the name Mark Twain, a term Mississippi riverboat men used for calling out the depth of water.

  More than slightly irr
everent, Mr. Twain. Amusing, though. Jephtha couldn’t have admitted it to his congregation, but he relished Twain’s comment about the arid Holy Land. “No Second Advent—Christ has been here once and will never come again.”

  Why in thunder couldn’t Kent and Son publish authors of Mr. Twain’s obvious talent? He knew the answer. The editor and general manager, Dana Hughes, was a solid craftsman. But he lacked imagination and nerve. The Boston book company needed a strong hand and a bold mind to direct it. The Union needed the same thing, because Theo Payne wouldn’t live forever—especially not at the rate he consumed whiskey.

  What the family properties needed was a young family member in charge! Alas, there was no Kent to shoulder the responsibility.

  Matt was living the dubious life of a Bohemian in London. One of his pictures had been accepted by the British Royal Academy for its annual exhibition, but that success was balanced by a personal loss. In one of his wretchedly spelled letters, he’d reported in a casual way that he and his wife had brokin up. Where Dolly was now, Matt didn’t say, but the news of an apparent divorce distressed Jephtha greatly.

  And Gideon—well, that was even sadder. Thanks to God-given intelligence, a bent for self-improvement, and the encouragement of his wife, Margaret, who had helped him learn to read and understand difficult material, then write down his own thoughts in acceptable prose, Jephtha Kent’s oldest son definitely had the ability to guide one or both of the family businesses, which had been repurchased from Louis Kent’s estate after his death in ’68. Unfortunately, Gideon wasn’t interested in the daily paper or the publishing house.

  After the war, he’d worked for a short time as a switchman in the Erie Railroad yards over in Jersey City. During a winter storm, a good friend of his had died in a work-related accident. Gideon had seen the effect of the tragedy on his friend’s family. He’d also seen how reluctant the Erie owners were to pay so much as a penny of postmortem benefits. Gideon had finally forced a payment from the railroad, and ever since, the tragic accident and the indifference of the bosses had influenced and directed his life. All he cared about was the cause of the workingman.