Skinny Island Read online

  “Surprise me then.”

  “Conroy Morrissey.”

  I stared and then blinked. “You mean a relative of the judge?”

  “I mean the judge himself.”

  “Agatha, is this a joke? The taste is questionable.”

  “It’s not a joke!” she cried in instant indignation. “Judge Morrissey is putting together a real estate deal that could make our fortune if he’d only include Charles. Oh, Father, you can’t spoil it!”

  “I know all about Morrissey’s real estate deals,” I said dryly. “I also know about his congressional record during the war. The man is not only dishonest; he was a Copperhead. He backed McClellan in sixty-four. I could almost prove he was a traitor. And you told him that I would favor his admission to the Irving? I wonder he didn’t laugh in your face.”

  “On the contrary, he said he had always been one of your greatest admirers.”

  “Well, he can continue to admire me from afar. A member of the Irving! Why, even if I could face the scandalized faces of my fellow members, how could I bear the reproachful eyes of your brother Archie’s spirit? Or of the three hundred thousand other boys who perished to preserve our union.”

  “Oh, Father, you and your war. It’s always hopeless when you start waving the bloody shirt.”

  My war! The bloody shirt! In one small decade had all memory of valor departed from the land? I had to be quiet for a moment to keep myself from some unseemly explosion. It was true that my enthusiasm for the Union cause had amounted to a religion—almost, in the eyes of some, to fanaticism. I had perhaps thought too much in terms of the glorious phrases of Mrs. Howe’s battle hymn accompanying General Sherman’s thrilling march to the sea and too little in terms of the corpses and maimed bodies of our boys in blue. And on occasion I force myself to recall—oh, the bitter memory!—the mild reproach of my darling Archie the first time he was wounded and I rushed to his side in Virginia with a pass from Secretary of War Stanton himself. “Father,” he murmured from his bed of pain, “did you stop to think that the men who escorted you to the front may have had to risk their lives?” Which is why I did not go to him after his fatal wounding at Gettysburg and was not there to hold his hand when he died. But whatever my exaggerations, whatever my sentimentalities even, as some might call them, are they not preferable to Agatha’s cold indifference to the generation of dead boys that made her ease and opulence possible?

  “Some memories will always be sacred to me,” I at last limited myself to stating.

  “But don’t you see, you can’t just live in memories?” Agatha demanded. “The world moves on. Archie himself would have seen that. He was always a practical fellow. He and I used to conspire together on how to dress things up when we had something to ask of you that we were afraid you’d refuse.”

  “Are you implying, Agatha, that Archie, if alive today, would approve of my taking into a club a man who wanted to sell out to secession?”

  “All I’m saying is that Archie would have let bygones be bygones. He did enough fighting in the war. He wouldn’t have kept it up all his life.”

  I am afraid that I almost disliked my daughter at that particular moment. Certainly I did not wish to stay another minute under her roof.

  That unhappy night we sat down twelve at my board for a dinner meeting of the Irving Club. The dozen men present included two judges, a former governor, a former mayor, the president of Columbia University, Jacob Smull and my son Philip. I thought the dining room with its Duncan Phyfe chairs, its splendid dark mahogany sideboard with the golden eagle claw feet and my great Sully of President Washington had never looked finer. I hoped that it would make a suitable impression on Smull for his first appearance in our midst. It did not.

  But nothing would have, as I now sadly see, other than the promise of a profitable investment. Smull appeared to me that night in the full glare of his singleness of mind and purpose. Perhaps it was the contrast that he afforded to my more richly variegated guests. Small, dry, bald, tight-lipped, he seemed to have shriveled to a mere husk of acquisitiveness. He did not even bother to pretend that it was a gratifying experience to make his maiden appearance in our midst. He spoke in a mild, rather quavering tone that nonetheless had the persistence of a bubbling stream. If it was occasionally lost to louder tones; as soon as the latter subsided, it was heard again.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, Governor, you’re going to see some rather cloudy skies in this Huntington Beach project. It’s all very well for the developers to assume that the potato farmer will welcome the intrusion of additional summer residents, but have they taken into consideration…?”

  As the evening wore on my dismay began to identify itself more with my other guests than with Smull. For when other topics were introduced, a novel of Mark Twain’s, plans for the new art museum, the plight of the Western bison, an exhibition of Kensett’s landscapes, Smull treated them as if they had been so many coughs or sneezes, either keeping a brief silence or else countering with another business question, only perfunctorily related to the subject. And the table went along with him! My distinguished fellow members were like so many choir boys swapping stories, who came to respectful attention when the priest came in to direct their attention to the service. Had I discovered the essence of our civilization? Men will defer to the first in any group who introduces a topic that is recognized as sacred. On an English weekend, over the port, I have seen how quickly the subject is changed, even from politics, to hunting; in France, even from money, to women. With us it seems to be money. Spending it, hoarding it, marrying it, killing for it—all of which strike me as at least human or dramatic subjects—are not in question. Only the making or the increasing of money seems to matter to the true Yankee.

  As the evening wore on and I became more and more silent, the small white face of Jacob Smull with its ever-moving pale lips began to seem to me less dull than sinister. He even achieved a kind of dignity, for there were unquestionably aspects of leadership in this sere wisp of a man. He was not, after all, just a grubber for coins; he was in fact a kind of priest, the prelate of an established order, an Inquisitor, a Torquemada, who knew that he did not have to raise his voice or wave his arms to command attention and profound respect.

  After dinner he came to sit beside me in the library for a word apart from the others.

  “It has been a pleasant evening, Peltz,” his flat tone reported. I have never heard him use a Christian name. “It occurred to me that you might like to hear of a gentleman who might appreciate these gatherings. I need not tell you of his distinguished public career. I refer to Judge Morrissey.”

  I felt a tickling through my veins. I actually smiled at my interlocutor! And then I recognized what was going on in my mind and through my limbs. It was the arrival of an irreversible decision. It was actually a pleasant sensation!

  “No, you need not tell me, Smull. I know all about Judge Morrissey’s treasonable career. Had he had his way we should now be two nations. And one of them would be a slave state.”

  My tone was so matter-of-fact that Smull needed a minute to take in my meaning.

  “Was it treason to be opposed to Abe Lincoln?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then you wouldn’t consider his candidacy?”

  “Never. But you’re free, of course, to ask others. I shall simply resign if he’s elected.”

  Smull pursed his lips into a tiny arc. “Well, I guess if it’s no club for you with him, it’s none for me without him. Good night, Mr. Peltz. Do you need my written resignation?”

  “It won’t be necessary, Mr. Smull. I’m sorry you feel as you do. We shall continue to meet at board meetings of the bank, I trust.”

  “For a time, Mr. Peltz.”

  He did not even have to put a threat in his tone. The words did everything.

  There was an atmosphere of relief when Smull had left, and the group now talked about everything under the sun, from the new territory of Alaska to the merit of Walt Whitma
n’s poetry. We were very hearty and drank several bottles of champagne. When all but Philip departed at midnight, I told him of Smull’s resignation. He was grim but not surprised.

  “He never forgives, you know. He seems impersonal, but he’s not. He’s vindictive.”

  “What can he do to me?”

  “Kick you out of Standard Trust.”

  “Haven’t I reached an age to retire?”

  “Father, what are you going to live on?” There was an agony of concern in Philip’s tone, and I recognized with a start that my son still loved me. “You know how much your principal has eroded.”

  “I do know. I shall sell this house and take a single room in one of the new hotels.”

  “You! Adrian Peltz!”

  “I shall be a free man, Philip.”

  “I suppose you could always live with me or Agatha.”

  “I couldn’t live with Agatha. You know that. And I’d never impose myself on your darling Mary.”

  “Father. Dad. Listen to me. That all sounds very brave, but you won’t like it when it comes. I had an idea that something like this was going to happen tonight, and I brought a manuscript I want you to read. You know that Mother kept a diary in her last two years, don’t you?”

  “And that she gave it to you before she died.” I nodded gravely. I had been bitterly hurt that she had not entrusted it to me. “To do with as you saw fit. In your absolute discretion. I have honored her wish. I have never even mentioned it to you.”

  “I know. You have been, as always, the perfect gentleman. But now I am exercising that discretion. I am giving it to you.”

  I stared. “You think there is something in the diary that will alter my decision about Smull?”

  “I hope there may be.”

  “I shall read it this very night.”

  “It won’t take you very long.”

  It didn’t. The journal covered only two years of Cecilia’s life, and each entry was brief; I was able to read it in a couple of hours. I had expected to be emotionally unsettled, and I was, but differently than I had anticipated. I found myself perusing the spidery handwriting with the admiration, at times even the jealousy, of a fellow journalist. For what was truly astonishing was the way in which our town, our whole life, was filtered through the curtains of the writer’s sickroom windows. Cecilia had seen more from her chaise longue than I in all my perambulations of Manhattan.

  Her glimpses of Washington Square—a reference to a blue sky, a child with a hoop, a beggar, a shaft of winter light along red brick, the toll of a bronze bell—were exquisite.

  A russet dawn; a shoulder-shuddering chill. Neighbor Matthews to wed today. Will he go to his office first? And then, at noon, open his gold watch to check the hour, nod, cover his ledger, and rise with that rusty cough? His entry: “Wind north northeast. Snow flurries. S.S. Persia still missing. Married Emily Hadden.”

  Cousin Laura here. How faded the poor dear! Adrian says she was always so, but now you can’t tell what color she first was. Spoke of the admitting doctor at Bellevue where she had her operation. Had she ever had a baby? That stare! “You must have misread my name, sir. It is Miss Temple.”

  The passage that I knew awaited me, the one that had induced Philip to give me the diary, was written only two weeks before my darling expired.

  It is leaving Adrian that gives me the greatest pain. Men are such idealists, and he the most of all! I sometimes think that half New York society is in a conspiracy to seem to be what Adrian deems it. Once they have glimpsed the beautiful conception in his mind it seems too terrible to let him even suspect the truth. For if he did, if that bright picture ever dimmed, might not some of their light go out as well? New York may have always been a shabby place, but isn’t it a touch less shabby if there’s an Adrian Peltz to believe in it? Oh, my darling Adrian, if you could only go first, with all the beauty of your young republic still intact in your nobly conceiving imagination, how patiently would I lie up here until it was time to join you!

  I have now written out and reread my account of the events of New Year’s Day, 1875. My first plan was the right one. This is the place to end my diary.

  The Stations of the Cross

  MISS JANE LYLE had continued to occupy the tall stooped brownstone, Number 11 West, on the north side of Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, ever since the death of her mother a decade before, in 1889. It was not a large house, being of the same size and shape as the others in the block, except, of course, for Mrs. Vanderbilt’s version of the Château of Blois at the corner, and it could be comfortably run for the old lady by three Irish maids, though even these would have been a drain on her slender resources had not her four brothers, who had prospered as the American agents for Coats thread, been willing to help out. No. 11, after all, had been the home of the old parents whom their sister, sacrificed in the Victorian tradition, had tended to the end. The male Lyles, cognizant of their obligation, were also glad to provide for their sister’s summers with annual bids to their villas in Newport, Narragansett and Bar Harbor.

  There was a sentiment among the brothers and their families that Jane’s life had been a union of sadness and gallantry. She was pictured as treasuring the memory of young Phineas Howland, killed at Antietam and of holding high the lamp of ancient patriotism in a tarnished modern world. Jane was perfectly willing to accept this tribute. What did it matter that she could not precisely recall the features of Phineas Howland or that he had never definitively proposed to her? No doubt he would have, had he come back from the war. And was it of any significance now that the parents whom Jane had so conscientiously nursed and whom she was supposed still tenderly to miss, had become senile invalids whose demises, within a year of each other, had been a blessed relief? Jane had learned the importance of allowing people to keep the image of oneself that it pleased them to keep.

  And, after all, she too had an image of herself; indeed, it was that which floated her soul. She was the spirit and rallying point of the whole Lyle clan, her four brothers and their multitudinous descendants—some sixty of them, including in-laws. It was septuagenarian Aunt Jane whose straight, tall, rather massive figure in dark brown or black, and square, strong-featured face with soberly staring eyes, had become familiar to every denizen of Fifty-seventh Street. It was she who gave the Christmas tree party, who led the singing at family song fests and who maintained the famous “treasure drawer” into which every Lyle descendant under the age of fourteen was entitled to reach and “grab” on a call to the venerable relative. When the good lady appeared on the street on her sedate journey to the park, or to the neighboring house of a sister-in-law, or to the Plaza Presbyterian Church, she provided reassurance in the stability of urban society to the passer-by who might reflect: “Well, so long as we have people like Miss Lyle…”

  Jane was aware that she was to some extent an actress playing a role, but she did not think that this was either undesirable or uncommon. She had seen her mother play the role of the brave invalid. She had also seen that role become a reality, which had given her confidence in the future of her own chosen part of indomitable old maid. Each passing year provided another layer of protection against any return of the silliness of a youth filled with disappointments both bitter and unrecognized by her family. She had wanted to marry, but had never been sure that she was sufficiently in love, and had finally attributed her lack of assured ardor to a heart lost to the corpse on that Maryland battlefield. She had wanted to write and publish inspired poetry, but her sole appearance in print had been in a slender, paper-bound packet entitled Sylvan Moods, paid for by a kind but condescending father. She had wanted, finally, in her late thirties, to go to England and study nursing after the example of Miss Nightingale, but her brothers had persuaded her that a more immediate and pressing duty was to their mother, already afflicted by the mysterious malady that would take so many long years to bring her to the tomb. But now all that was behind her, well behind her—the gushing, the flushing, t
he hysterical tears, the rushing upstairs to her bedroom, the slamming of doors—now there was calm and sense and no mystery. Everyone knew, including Jane Lyle, just where Jane Lyle stood.

  Yet having assurances did not mean that she was averse to an occasional surprise. Having placidity did not mean that she had eschewed all excitement. Jane was looking forward now, with an almost uncomfortable intensity, to a visit from the Reverend Gordon Muir. She was very devoted to this young man, whom she allowed to address her as “Aunt Jane.” Gordon was the assistant to the golden-tongued minister of the Plaza Presbyterian Church, and his ardent passion to visit the Holy Sepulcher had inspired Jane with the still secret and feverishly debated notion of using her small hoarded savings to send him there. But the real motive for this proposed generosity she found more difficult to face, and each time that she caught herself avoiding the mental confrontation, she had to remind herself: “Jane Lyle, don’t be an old fool! Why can’t you, in the privacy of your own mind, ask yourself if Gordon Muir isn’t in love with Mrs. Bullock? If he’s not, thank your God. If he is, the trip to Jerusalem might be just the thing he needs to give him the strength of soul to overcome Satan!”

  Gordon was a plump, short, pale young man, but he had large lustrous brown eyes and thick blond curly hair that reminded Jane of a cherub. She liked to think of him as a Byronic poet; the intensity of his enthusiasms more than made up for any physical shortcomings. As Mr. Bullock had confided once to Jane: “That young man cares almost too much for God.” If this sounded irreverent, Jane could still see what he meant. When Gordon led the congregation in prayer, his eyes tightly closed, his head flung back, he seemed to be almost in a trance. When he loudly sang a hymn, following the choir with Mr. Bullock down the aisle in the processional march, he might have been striding to a martyr’s death in the arena. But when he assisted Mrs. Bullock at her tea table this same fervor seemed to emanate from a less spiritual source: the raven hair and sullen black eyes of the pastor’s wife, who, incidentally, was just half the pastor’s age. Jane might have been willing to attribute her suspicion to what her nephew, Tom, who liked to play the “outrageous Lyle” (another role), called the “erotic daydreaming of the dirty Presbyterian mind,” had it not been for a certain complacency in Mrs. Bullock’s demeanor.