The Americans (4 page)

That brought another laugh from Willie. "Oh, the devil. I forgot Charlie was asleep in there." Carter quickly stepped away. "Like hell you did." caret Willie walked back to the gas ring. "Go ahead, get your beer. Charlie won't bother you. I got him drunk again tonight." Warily, Carter leaned down and dipped his mug in the pail. Champagne Charlie, as Hearst's pet alligator was officially named, regarded Carter with a sinister eye for a moment. Then he lowered his head lethargically. Carter slammed the door. He sat down and sipped the beer. It didn't do much to raise his spirits. Nor did the hot, zesty cheese dish Willie served. The young Californian folded himself into a chair again. He spooned up some of the rabbit. Tapped a napkin against his lips, then said: 'I don't blame you for feeling rotten. I knew right after we met that we were peas from the same pod. Must be why we get along so well. We both hate the unexpected-unless, of course, we engineer it to surprise somebody else. And we like to hold the reins. Can't stand to let another person control things, am I right?" An emphatic nod from Carter. Willie continued: "I'll tell you something else. Personally, I can't take much more of the regimentation around here. Chapel. Roll calls. Lesson recitation-I doubt 111 ever get my degree. I wanted to go into the theater like your stepsister Eleanor. Mother wouldn't hear of it. But it's the theater's loss-was To cheer his friend, he jumped up, threw his head back and yodeled. Then he executed one of the quick, deft minstrel show dance steps he admired. With his beer mug raised and his other fist cocked on his hip, Willie grinned at Carter: "It's the theater's loss. I'm pretty good, don't you think?" "Wonderful." "Don't strain yourself with enthusiasm." Willie faced the wall, as if an audience sat there. He bowed from the waist several times. "I love applause-was "It isn't the applause you like, Willie, it's being around actresses." "Well, that too," Willie admitted, smiling again. He flopped back into the chair. "You know, maybe we're both simpletons for wasting our time here. I know Harvard's the finest school in America. "But I've already dropped more courses than I'll finish this year, and there isn't a blasted thing in the curriculum I give two hoots about." He hunched forward. "The only thing that interests me is a problem Gene's going to inherit next year." Eugene Lent was the son of one of George Hearst's business associates. He was the friend with whom Willie had traveled in Europe when both were younger. "What problem?" 'The poor chump has agreed to be business manager of the Lampoon. Thankless job! Humor doesn't sell very well at this pious institution. And the business manager has to make up any operating losses out of his own pocket." Carter whistled. "I didn't know that. It's true. I'd like to help Gene. I don't mean with loans. I mean by thinking up schemes to get people to read the magazine. Stunts, contests, maybe a parade-I'd enjoy that." "Because you'd be controlling things." "Things and people." Willie grinned. "Without letting 'em know I was doing it. That's part of the game, too." He ambled to the armoire. Helped himself to beer. Champagne Charlie again raised his deadly-looking head and scrutinized his owner for a few seconds before returning to sleep. Willie knocked foam from his mustache after he drank. "That's the real charm in life, Carter. Holding the reins. That and a good joke. Pa isn't much for joking, but he surely likes the other. I expect that's why he's so eager to go to the Senate." Carter had heard a good deal about George Hearst's political ambitions. A loyal Democrat, Hearst had bought the foundering San Francisco Examiner, the unofficial newspaper of the local party organization. He'd pumped money into it in the hope of furthering his political career. But the effort hadn't been enough to earn him the 1882 Democratic endorsement as the candidate for governor. He'd lost the primary by a narrow margin. Undiscouraged, he was searching for a stepping-stone to Washington. All at once, Willie fixed his friend with one of his disconcerting stares: "Pa's going to make it some day. Then he'll handle the reins smartly. That's what politics is all about. Maybe you should try it. You could start by passing out handbills, or running errands for a boss. You might enjoy it, and that silver tongue of yours would take you a long way, I think." Carter momentarily forgot Professor Eisler. "In which party?" he asked. "Why, the Democracy, I suppose." "The Kents are Republicans." Willie waved his mug. "A sinner can always reform. I tell you, for a fellow who likes to be in charge, politics is a natural." "Then why don't you try it?" "With this voice?" Willie let out a loud yodel. "I'd be laughed off the platform. Even my looks are against me." He swigged beer, then finished with what sounded like perfect confidence, "I'll find some other way. But I'll pull the reins, too, you can count on that." The more Carter thought about Willie's suggestion, the more it intrigued him. Politicians wielded immense influence. Disbursed huge sums of patronage money and col- lected rewards in turn. Sometimes those rewards took the form of bank drafts or stock certificates. A great many important Americans were constantly in need of favors from Washington, which helped explain why most top-level politicians could afford large wardrobes, lavish homes, and frequent European vacations. Of course there were risks in politics. Look at what had happened to poor Garfield two years earlier. But he could handle the risks, he decided. The conclusion came easily because of the beer. He investigated and found there was plenty left in the armoire. This time Champagne Charlie didn't even raise his head. Carter helped himself, anxious to let the beer ease him into forgetting he'd been unable to control anything or anyone tonight. He lurched back to his chair, his confidence ebbing rapidly. If he couldn't carry off a student prank, how the devil could he ever hope to maneuver his way into political office? He couldn't buy his way, obviously. He stood to inherit only a token sum from the Kent fortune; his mother had already informed him that the bulk of Gideon's estate would go to Eleanor and W. Well, he'd get around those obstacles somehow. He and Willie finished the food and then guzzled more beer, talking non-stop between drinks. The drunker they got, the more fanciful became the careers they spun for themselves. Carter rose from dispenser of political leaflets to big-city machine boss. Willie graduated from circulation manager of a humor magazine to newspaper reporter. In a final step, he became a publisher more influential than Gideon Kent of the Union, and more ambitious than Joe Pulitzer, the St. Louis newspaperman who was in the process of buying Jay Gould's moribund New York World. Willie was, at the end, a publisher whose impact was felt far beyond San Francisco; a publisher who shaped national opinion and influenced national policy-and knowing his friend, Carter believed that was exactly what Willie would be one of these days. Carter lost track of time. He put Eisler, the aborted prank, and the wrecked wagon completely out of his mind. Sometime after midnight a thunderstorm broke. By then he was asleep in the armchair. When he awoke, gray light showed outside the rain-speckled window. He was brutally sober. He sat up and groaned. Willie raised his head. He'd been asleep on the couch, a full-sized coverlet barely reaching from his neck to the mid-point of his calves. He yawned, then scrutinized his friend: "You sick?" "Yes. I just remembered what happened last night." His bones creaked as he pushed against the arms of the chair. "I have to go home." "We could send out for more beer." Carter grew dizzy suddenly. Speech was difficult: "I-need some air. Thanks for the hospitality, Willie. I like your idea about politics. But first I have to get by the old professor." "Use that silver tongue," Willie advised in a sleepy voice. "Talk your way out." "Just the ticket," Carter nodded as he stumbled to the door. "Why didn't I think of that-?" Then he told a lie: "It'll be easy." IV Carter trudged toward the Charles River in a dawn that smelled of the rain that had already moved out to sea. A pebble in his shoe bedeviled him. When he reached the Cambridge Street bridge, he took off the shoe, inverted it and held it out beyond the rail to shake the pebble loose. The shoe slipped from his grasp and fell to the water. He bellowed an obscenity that brought a reproving shake of the finger from the driver of an early horse car just traveling into Cambridge. For a moment Carter watched the shoe go bobbing away downstream. Then he limped on toward Charles Street. What was he going to tell his mother and stepfather? He thought of several unbelievable stories, and rejected them all because they were ludicrous, and because they were lies. He loved his mother, but he also respected her. She was too intelligent to be fooled by invented stories. And as he'd told Willie, he didn't lie to Julia or Gideon. Not often, anyway. That was just about his only remaining point of honor. "Just swallow the medicine," he muttered to himself as he walked slowly and wearily eastward along Beacon Street, through a dawn awash with familiar smells of fish, cordage tar, and the lump coal smoke plumed from scores of household chimneys. The morning was chilly. His teeth began to chatter. He clenched them, then raised his head and squared his shoulders. He could take the worst that Edmund Eisler had to offer. The very worst. Didn't Gideon always say the Kents were, above aUs, survivors? But unconsciously, he began whistling "Pop Goes the Weasel" to keep his courage up. CHAPTER V At Home on Beacon Street MORE THAN FIFTY MILLION people inhabited the United States in 1883. Only a few hundred belonged to what was termed Society. The Kents did not. Although they were one of the richest families in the nation, wealth alone had not been enough to get them an invitation to the social event of the year-Mrs. William K. Vandefbilt's costume ball. The ball had been held on the night of March 26. By any standard, it exceeded anything yet offered for the approval of those who comprised Society. In prior years Mrs. Astor's annual ball in January had always been considered the season's paramount event. The Vanderbilt affair changed that. Conservative estimates said it cost the hostess a quarter of a million dollars to stage her I little party. The opulence of the costumes of the guests was matched only by the cleverness of some of them. Another Vanderbilt, Mrs. Cornelius, had come arrayed in white satin and diamonds, representing the electric light. And although elaborately costumed and choreographed quadrilles were no novelty at formal balls, Mrs. Vanderbilt's quadrilles- especially the Hobby Horse Quadrille featuring realistic, life-size representations of horses which were attached to the dancers" waists-had been talked offor days afterward. No wonder the established leader of Society, Caroline Astor- the Mrs. Astor, as she preferred to be known-had been forced to recognize Mrs. Vanderbilt at long last. Before the ball, Mrs. Astor had discovered that her daughter was rehearsing for the Star Quadrille but had not received a card of invitation. The significance of the omission was clear. There would be no invitation unless Mrs. Astor paid her respects to Mrs. Vanderbilt, even though the latter was theoretically inferior in the social ranking. Putting her daughter above her pride, Mrs. Astor ordered up her carriage and drove to the Vanderbilt chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue in New York. She sent one of her blue-liveried footmen inside with her card. In recognition of her eminence, it bore only the words Mrs. Astor. She didn't personally enter the mansion, or even leave the carriage. But she had humbled herself sufficiently. The invitation was in her daughter's hands soon afterward. No symbolic act of reverence could have secured an invitation for Gideon and Julia. The list of reasons was an extremely long one. Julia's family credentials-she had been born a Sedgwick-might once have entitled her to consideration, but they no longer did. Not since she had divorced one Kent- Amanda's son-and married another. The women who ruled New York Society did not divorce. Not even if their husbands slept with other women, which most of them did. Julia was also on the disapproved list because she had publicly espoused the causey of female suffrage. Gideon had even more against him. First, he'd served on the Confederate side during the war. After Appomattox he'd associated himself for a time with the labor movement. His newspaper and his publishing house were considered scandalously liberal. And lie was "in trade," the contemptuous term for anyone who wasn't a gentleman of leisure, I living off a business income but doing nothing to earn it. Gideon actively involved himself in his business, and had even been known to repair a broken book press if the schedule of Kent and Son demanded it. His recent history was cloudy, too. His first wife had died in a fall from a window of the mansion he'd formerly owned on upper Fifth Avenue. His daughter was in a disreputable profession, and his younger brother had a reputation for outrageous behavior. In Europe, Matthew Kent's paintings were making him famous, but his escapades had long ago made him notorious in his native land. Added to this was Gideon's murky role in the 1877 shooting death of the Chicago railroad magnate Thomas Courtleigh. All in I all, the head of the Kent family had a reputation as a radical and a roughneck. Definitely not good social material. There was one other event which absolutely assured the Kents' ostracism. This was what Gideon privately referred to as the McAllister Incident. Two years earlier he'd had a sharp encounter with the man who served as Society's unofficial prime minister, responsible for drawing up the guest lists for the balls which the great ladies gave, and for planning the themes and costumes of the quadrilles performed at those balls. Mentally-and sometimes openly-Gideon called that gentleman the little toad. In Gideon's estimation, Mr. Samuel Ward McAllister was undistinguished in intellect as well as appearance. He a - was remarkable only in that he managed to prosper by * being no more than a parasite. It disgusted Gideon that a born Southerner would thus debase himself. Perhaps that was why, during a chance meeting at Gideon's club in New York, things had gone badly. After introductions, someone had happened to mention Gideon's war record. This brought a sniff from McAllister. "I'm from Savannah, as you may know. But at least I was never a traitor." He eyed Gideon's chin. "Your beard led me to briefly mistake you for a member of the Grand Army of the Republic." "I don't know what led me to briefly mistake you for a