False Gods Page 2

  Girls were especially awed by his new reputation; his good looks were now described as Byronic. His reticence and solitary habits added to his fascination, and to Kitty Cabell, the prettiest debutante of her Richmond season, he seemed the Corsair himself. Roger had known Kitty since childhood; they were even, like so many of the first families, related, and he had long been perfectly clear that she had the characteristics, both good and bad, of the renowned Southern belle. She was superficial and affected, and she posed as being a good deal sillier and less worldly than she was, but she was also enchanting. She now turned her full lights upon him and soon aroused his lust to the point where he was reluctantly willing to pay society’s price to sleep with her. They were married in 1855, shortly after his father’s death from a stroke, and settled in Castledale.

  Kitty proved one of those rare persons who become perfectly amiable when their ambition is satisfied. As chatelaine of Castledale and mother of a small son, she happily took the lead in the local society and got on splendidly with her docile mother-in-law, who continued to live in the house. That Roger, engaged in his law practice and the supervision of the beloved plantation, should be little concerned with her she accepted as the conventional attitude of a husband. So long as his manners were correct—and they invariably were—she was content with her bargain. But no more children came, and in time he requested his own bedroom. If he ever had an affair, she never learned of it, and that was all she cared about. As for herself, there was never any idea of a lover. She was afraid that Roger might have killed him.

  Everything would have been well enough, in Kitty’s opinion, had the Yankees only seen fit to leave them alone. She had spent much of her youth in Paris, where her father had represented a syndicate of tobacco planters, and she had viewed with a detachment imbued in her by her older brother Lemuel, a satirical dilettante, the semiludicrous efforts of their Francophile parents to be included in the gratin of the old faubourg. Lemuel had taken a perverse delight in establishing his dominance over his pretty younger sibling by exposing the silliness of a father who spent an hour every morning practicing his French r and of his mother, who thought she would ingratiate herself in legitimist circles by dressing as closely as she could to the Empress Eugénie. He made Kitty understand that Vielle France, however polite, however amicale, was never going to clasp to its bosom or allow to marry one of its sons an American girl who wasn’t a Catholic and who hadn’t a fortune, the plantation at home being morally entailed to the firstborn, a brother older than her and Lemuel. Kitty learned that in a foolish world one had to rely on oneself, and she didn’t forget this when the family returned to Richmond. She had no greater loyalty to slave-holding Virginia than she did to the Faubourg St.-Germain. She laughed at the golden calves on both sides of the Atlantic, but she was always careful to laugh to herself.

  Roger’s attitude to the great issue of the day struck her as just as senseless as everyone else’s. He believed that the slaves should be freed, but he was quite willing to kill anyone but himself who proposed to free them. At least that was how it looked to her. He disguised his fierce ego, as she saw it, behind the mask of a Virginia patriot. And after the abortive John Brown raid onto his sacred state’s soil, he became as hot a secessionist as the fiery South Carolinian whose brains he had blown out.

  In the first years of the fighting, during which she had to manage a crumbling plantation while he was off, all over the state, with Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, she sometimes complained to her mother-in-law that the wives and mothers of warriors had the worst of their wars.

  “Let us call it our glory,” the docile widow would invariably reply.

  2

  Hate sustained Roger during the whole of the conflict, hate and, at least in the first two years, his hope that the Confederacy’s choice of Richmond as its capital might restore Virginia to the leadership it had enjoyed in the golden days of Mr. Jefferson. No compromise, he always insisted grimly, was possible with the enemy that was ravaging his native state. Although he met some captive Union officers who he had to concede had shown at least the courage of gentlemen, he could only pity them as the tools of an unholy alliance between fanatical abolitionists and avaricious war profiteers. And when, after two years of constant campaigning, he was offered the relief of a staff job in Richmond, accompanied with a promotion, he turned both down to continue in the cavalry. Nothing else seemed to make any sense to him.

  The double defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg destroyed his last illusion of ultimate victory for secession. No matter how many battles or skirmishes his company won on mangled Virginia soil, no matter how horribly its rich beloved red clay seemed to ooze Yankee blood, there were always new waves of the boys in blue rising out of the very foam of their collapsed predecessors.

  He had no wish to survive the inevitable end. He was wounded three times but always slightly; he seemed to be proving the old adage that death avoids those who seek it in battle. The long days in the saddle riding through familiar countrysides, sinister now in their haunting beauty, the nights in the field where he would let his exhausted body drop to the earth after swinging the lead ends of his blanket around his shoulders, began to produce an odd consolation in their very monotony and dreariness. Once when he sat up till dawn couching in his lap the head of a boy whose lifeblood was slowly dripping away, he felt something like peace at his own acceptance of all that the loathed enemy had destroyed. But he could not bear the sight of Castledale; on one of his leaves he put up at a hotel in Richmond rather than go home. And when word reached him that his mother had died, he could only be thankful for what she had been spared.

  After Appomattox he had the privilege of a few words with General Lee, who had stood as godfather to his son seven years before. Like all the army he worshipped Lee, but he was ready to relegate him to the past. “Go home, my friend,” the general said. “Now the real task awaits us. God helping, we shall not shirk it.”

  Roger nodded and went home, but he stayed there only a year. He felt like an atheist who has died only to discover that there is an afterlife. It might not be a better one, but at least he would be free of the old.

  “I’m going up to New York to see whether I can make a living there practicing law,” he informed his younger brother, Ned, a mild and gentle man, a bachelor, who deemed it entirely fitting that he should fall in with all of Roger’s schemes. “Look after Castledale and Kitty and the boy. If I don’t starve, I’ll send for them when I can provide them with a home there. Explain this to Kitty tactfully after I’ve gone.”

  A cousin of his mother’s had married a well-to-do New York landlord, Basil Tremont, a generous victor, who had answered Roger’s letter of inquiry with the assurance that he would help him at least to a modest start.

  Roger’s cousin had a small office on Canal Street, where he and one old clerk and an even older female secretary handled the Tremont family affairs, largely the collection of tenement rents, and he accorded his Southern relative a narrow cubicle, used for file storage, as his “chambers.” But it was free, and although there was no question of Roger’s getting his hands on the family law business, he did receive an occasional crumb from that ample table in the form of a small eviction or lease renewal. Furthermore, Basil Tremont was good enough to tout these services to the guests at the Sunday night suppers in Union Square to which Roger was occasionally invited, and he thus picked up some modest retainers, enough, anyway, to pay for his bedroom in Houston Street and his simple meals.

  He used his plentiful spare time, both day and night, in studying New York cases and statutes in the library of the Manhattan Law Institute. He had no interest in the social scene or in public amusements. He heartily despised the whole dirty brown noisy city with its Yankee twangs and its Yankee familiarities. He had come north for one purpose only, the recoupment of his fortune, and his eye was rarely averted from that goal. But he perfectly realized that this could not be accomplished by law alone, and he was careful to cultivate the few important men h
e met at the Tremont Sunday gatherings.

  The talk there, however, was dominated by the women, whose importance Roger recognized but did not exaggerate. Mrs. Tremont, a vast cheerful bundle of flesh and red velvet, could get anything she wanted from her pale bald spouse, but she wanted things only for herself and her offspring. She and her fellow matrons had not the smallest interest in business or politics; the power they sought and achieved was purely domestic. They had, of course, the power to ruin a man with their tongues, but any such danger was easily averted by a routine exhibition of Southern gallantry. They were rather titillated at meeting a handsome and impoverished rebel officer; they enjoyed the idea of exercising a beneficent open-mindedness in their affable condescension to a safely defeated enemy. If Roger had been free, he might even, with a skillful play of his few trumps, have secured the hand of one of their well-endowed daughters. As it was, he had to direct his principal attention to the men.

  The City Club, a large pink-and-white building on Madison Square with a membership of lawyers, judges and politicians, was more useful to him. The ever-generous Basil had treated him to a year’s guest membership, and it was an easy enough matter for a former Confederate officer, dropping into the big bar with the oak-paneled walls and potted palms, to fall into friendly converse with those members who had served in the Union Army and evoke the bond between fighting men that never quite includes even the bravest noncombatant. Roger, in postmortems of battles, was always careful to avoid any criticism of Union strategy. His cool good manners, unaffected by the few drinks he permitted himself, made him popular, and after his year’s free membership was up, he found it renewed for another without dues. When he went to the treasurer’s office to inquire about this, he was politely shown a minute from a meeting of the board of directors stating that Colonel Carstairs could pay dues “when his ship came in.”

  Roger decided to accept this. He would not have done so in Richmond, but then Richmond was reality, a quality he was not willing to accord New York.

  The president of the club, Charles Van Rensselaer Pratt, turned out to be just the man he had been looking for. He was every inch a gentleman—at least, as Northerners defined that term—tall and grave and dignified, with a short, well-cut beard and dull blue gazing eyes under bushy eyebrows which seemed to be wondering whether you were as much a gentleman as he. His Knickerbocker background would have qualified him more for the presidency of the Union than the City Club, but Roger had heard that his intense patriotism during the war, throughout the whole of which, like Roger, he had fought, had prompted him to resign from an institution some of whose most distinguished members had favored a compromise peace. Pratt at forty looked ten years older, as fitted the senior partner of the Wall Street firm that his late father had founded, and his reputation for honor and high-mindedness was unchallenged. The same, however, could not be said of some of his partners. There were even those who dared to suggest that he was a figurehead of respectability to be displayed in nobly speechifying meetings of bar associations and behind whose broad and stylishly tailored back a good deal of less edifying but profitable business was transacted.

  Pratt was intrigued by what he called Roger’s decision to “move his career north.” He visited the club regularly on Monday nights, when his wife dined with her invalid mother, and made his two whiskies last for two hours. He soon made it a habit to invite Roger to join him at his reserved table in a corner of the barroom. They would talk of problems facing the South and what Pratt called its “future redemption and regeneration.” Roger, for whom whiskey had become a controlled solace, found that it increased his tact by temporarily softening his bitterness. He was not even tempted to call the club president an ass.

  “Oh, I suppose the South will come back in a way,” he conceded as he puffed his pipe, for he smoked now too. “But it will not be in any way that will interest me. I have seen the old days, and there can be no possible revival of them.”

  “But surely in time the great plantations will revive. Will it make such a difference to you that the hands will be paid instead of owned? Mightn’t they even be more efficient?”

  Roger smiled inwardly at this hint from the counsel to capitalists. “It’s not that, sir. I belonged to the civilization that died at Appomattox. I do not care for reconstructions.”

  “So you will stay here?”

  “If I can survive here.”

  “And bring your family north?”

  “In time.”

  “How do you think they will like it here?”

  Roger smiled again, this time outwardly with a touch of grimness. “Kitty will like it, if I can buy the things she wants. The boy, I suppose, will grow up a brave little Yankee.”

  “And what about your place? It’s called Castledale?”

  But Roger was not ready to discuss Castledale with even a well-meaning Yankee.

  “My brother will take care of it.”

  “Well, I’m sure that our divisions will heal sooner with men like you in our midst. Men who have fought with courage and conviction for a cause in which they seriously believed.”

  Roger treated himself to a long sip of whiskey in answer to this. Nothing could be allowed to impede him from finding an opening in Pratt’s firm. When he spoke, it was to give the topic a new twist. “Does it ever occur to you that the real winners of the conflict in which you and I battled so long and hard were not the soldiers at all, but the ones who had the wit to stay home?”

  Pratt’s blue eyes took on something like a spark. “You mean the dastardly profiteers?”

  “I mean all those who put business ahead of war. How many of your veterans do you see in the entourage of the new president?”

  Pratt’s sigh was windy. “Very few indeed, I fear. General Grant seems to have forgotten his old comrades. I cannot see what he sees in market speculators of that type.”

  “If we fighting men would stick together, we might have a chance to run the show.”

  “Do you know, sir, I like that idea! And do you know that of the ten partners in my firm I am the only one to have worn the blue uniform?”

  Roger raised his glass. “To the blue and the grey!” He just managed to suppress a laugh as Pratt smote the table with his fist in his enthusiasm.

  Roger had a project for Pratt on their next meeting. He had been reading in the newspapers about the struggle of the New York and Albany Railway Company to corner the stock of the Ontario line, a client of Pratt’s firm. He had obtained copies of all the briefs in the various lawsuits involved and studied them carefully. On a Monday night at the City Club he expounded a plan of defense to Pratt that was so simple as to have escaped the attention of the lawyers on both sides.

  “I note that the Albany line has succeeded in obtaining an injunction from Judge Barnard of the Supreme Court of New York County prohibiting Ontario from issuing more stock for any reason. I fail to see the basis for so sweeping an order.”

  “The basis, I fear, may lie in the venality of His Honor. The Albany line is stronger with the city’s judiciary than we seem to be.”

  “The city’s judiciary. What about trying a judge farther north? In Sullivan County, say, or Columbia?”

  “But what have they to do with us?”

  “As much as any of the supreme courts in Manhattan. Doesn’t each supreme court have plenary jurisdiction throughout the state?”

  “Hmm. That is so, isn’t it? But why should upstate judges interfere in matters that don’t concern them?”

  “You could make it their concern.”

  “How?”

  “How did your opponents do it?”

  “You don’t mean we should bribe them?”

  Roger laughed so that he could retreat into a joke if needed. “Think how much cheaper an upstate country judge would be than one of the gorged jurists of our opulent town!”

  “Carstairs, what are you saying?”

  “How many of these black gowns were fighting men, Pratt?”

  Pratt loo
ked at him gravely and then chuckled. He too would treat it in jest. “Still, the idea of petitioning an upstate judge is interesting. I’ll discuss it with my partners. After all, we might find one who would be glad to correct an injustice. Yes, why not? It is certainly a novel idea.”

  Pratt took the matter up with his firm, and the very next day Roger was summoned to the office of the partner in charge of litigation, Carl Gleason, a ferret-faced little man whose nervous fingers roamed like spiders over the silver objects on his desk while his cold eyes remained fixed on his visitor. Having heard Roger’s exposition, he wasted no time in offering him a job as a clerk in Pratt & Stirling. But he was clearly a bit taken aback by how hard Roger bargained over salary; obviously he was dealing more with a fighting colonel than a starving ex-rebel attorney. When they came at last to terms, he issued this parting warning: “I trust it is quite understood that you are working for me and no other partner. And no other partner includes even Mr. Pratt. I am always very particular with that in litigations.”

  Roger nodded. He quite understood. There were things he might have to do that the senior partner was not to know about. That the senior partner might very well not want to know about. And indeed his very first job was to journey north to the township of Ayer in the county of Clinton to consult one Supreme Court Justice Owen, whose initial reluctance to exercise his injunctive powers in favor of Mr. Gleason’s client was overcome by an envelope passed silently across his desk.

  Thereafter it was always Roger who took care of what Gleason called the “delicate side” of litigation. His salary was increased twice so that after only two years he was able to bring Kitty and young Osgood north and lodge them in a brownstone on Brooklyn Heights. And only two years after that he presented himself one morning before Gleason’s desk and coolly demanded to know whether the time had not come for him to be made a junior partner in the firm.