The Last Days of Night, page 9
High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.
—CHARLES F. KETTERING, INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRICAL STARTER
ON A HUMID morning that August, Paul was startled by a rap on his office door. He looked up from his correspondence to see the stunned face of the firm’s secretary, Martha.
“You have a visitor,” she said. “Well, actually…two of them.”
The calling card she handed him contained a name familiar from the society pages.
“Agnes Huntington is in the waiting area?”
“Yes.”
“The real Agnes Huntington?”
“If a girl that lovely isn’t the real Agnes Huntington,” answered Martha, “then I can’t imagine what a light the original must be.”
Why was he being visited by one of the leading young singers of the New York stage?
Of course he knew all about her. He read the papers. She was American by birth, but she’d come to fame in London, selling out a run of Paul Jones at the Prince of Wales, where, in a brilliant spark of casting, she’d performed the male title role. The glowing notices she’d received for such a bravura comedic feat had traveled across the Atlantic. Agnes had followed them soon enough, singing for a long run in the Boston Ideals and then making a tour of the East Coast. The Metropolitan Opera had finally courted her away at what the papers suggested had been a considerable expense. The summer season was consumed with talk that she would reprise her famed role. Paul hadn’t seen it, of course. An evening’s box at the Met would likely cost him a month’s salary, if he was even able to purchase a ticket. Lawyers were day laborers to the truly rich. That attorneys labored with pens rather than shovels did not dignify their position in the eyes of Rockefellers and Morgans and Roosevelts. It only made their attempts at society life all the more quaint.
And yet Agnes Huntington, the brightest star to shine under the glow of Broadway’s footlights, was waiting patiently in Paul’s front room.
“You said there were two visitors?” inquired Paul. “Who is the other one?”
“Oh,” replied Martha. “It’s her mother.”
—
“Luminous” had been among the words the London papers had chosen to describe the twenty-four-year-old star. Paul might have gone even further in his choice of adjectives. Agnes’s curly ash-blond hair was perfectly done up in a halo around her face. Her skin was the same milky shade as her teeth. Her eyes were a winter gray, and they were impossible to read. Blue lace hung from the bottom of her green dress. The lace alone was likely more expensive than Paul’s entire suit. And yet as pristine as she appeared, her demeanor was not delicate. She was no porcelain doll. She was a distant glacier. Remote, quiet, and yet possessed of great and unknowable activity beneath the surface.
Paul found the effect unnerving. Luckily, her mother, Fannie, did enough talking for the three of them.
Yes, tea would be welcome. No, sugar would not. The matter that they had come to discuss was quite a delicate one. Paul’s discretion would be appreciated. They were in need of an attorney who could see to it that the present situation did not find its way to The Sun’s society page. Paul, Fannie Huntington had gathered, represented George Westinghouse against Thomas Edison. He had, perhaps, some experience with underdogs. He was unafraid of an unfair fight.
The mention of Thomas Edison reminded Paul of his professional capacity. “I can assure you,” he said, “that whoever it is who’s giving you trouble, he could not possibly be as powerful a foe as Thomas Edison.”
This was precisely what Fannie Huntington wanted to hear. Paul did not get the impression that she was a woman frequently disappointed. She was among the smallest women Paul had ever seen, but fit a double-sized personality into a squat bullet of a frame. She was a rifle shell. Hardened and cooled, packed and loaded, ever ready to explode. How this mother had bred this daughter was a question for Mr. Darwin.
The problem, Fannie explained, had begun in Boston, when Miss Agnes was singing with the Ideals. Was Paul aware of this group, she asked, and of Agnes’s previous position therein?
“Mr. Cravath is quite aware of who I am, Mother,” said Agnes more sharply than he would have imagined. Her speaking voice had a hard edge. It gave no indication of the marvel that had made her famous. “He knows that I sang with the Ideals. He knows that I’m singing at the Met now. I’d wager he’s likely been to a matinee.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t been so lucky.” Paul supposed this confession would lower him a peg in her estimation.
“Well, then we must invite you to a performance,” suggested Agnes graciously, without hint of condescension.
Paul had met but two strains of celebrity. The first laboriously upheld the pretense of being unaware of their own fame; they feigned humble surprise when you knew who they were. Golly! The second were experienced enough in their position not to bother. Agnes, having fit more than a few years of fame into her brief life, was of this latter type.
That she felt no need to prove anything to him, while he felt such desire to prove much to her, only accentuated the continent of social distance between them.
“So what is it that befell you in Boston?” he asked formally.
“Oh, it began in Boston,” answered Fannie. “But the difficulty occurred in Peoria.”
The Ideals, she explained, had traveled on their first tour of the Midwest. Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri. Of course, Agnes had never before sung in such places, Fannie was quick to note. But W. H. Foster, the owner of the Ideals, had been motivated by pecuniary gain to attempt a tour of places that did not have exposure to the higher arts. Tickets had been discounted for farmers and the like. What the Ideals might lose in the quality of their patrons they could make up for in quantity.
Single-night engagements were the standard for the tour. An evening in Gary, Indiana, for example, before two thousand theatergoers who were, as Fannie put it, “inexperienced attendees of a fine performance.” Then on to Dayton for another show the next night. Her daughter had begun to feel like she’d joined up with P. T. Barnum.
In Peoria, Illinois, this conflict came to a head: Mr. Foster told Agnes that to save money, she’d have to travel with the chorus. Naturally, such a thing wouldn’t do. Agnes complained politely. But Mr. Foster had not met Agnes’s arguments with reason. Instead, he’d met them with undeserved punishment.
First, he forbade Fannie from traveling with her daughter. Then he began to skim from Agnes’s salary. They had a contract, one that made very plain that Agnes was to receive two hundred dollars per week while on tour. First, ten dollars went missing from her weekly check. Mr. Foster said it was a mistake of his accountant’s and he’d see to fixing it. He did not. A few weeks later the deficit was fifty dollars. Then one hundred dollars. And soon enough Agnes was receiving less than half of her agreed-upon salary.
So, at the advice of her concerned mother, Agnes quit the Ideals. She packed her bags, got on a train in Chicago, and two days later was home in Boston. Within a few months’ time, the Met had happily moved Agnes and her mother to New York. Her career proceeded apace.
However, their wish to put this whole miserable ordeal behind them had gone unfulfilled. Mr. Foster had threatened suit against Agnes for her sudden departure. She told him that he could keep the money that he’d stolen, but that wasn’t enough for Mr. Foster. He was demanding that Agnes return to Boston, to sing again with the Ideals.
“And if Miss Huntington does not do as he asks?” asked Paul.
“Mr. Foster claims to have many friends among the newspapermen of Chicago. He says that with only a letter, he could cause quite a stir. He could tell horrid lies to the paper about the reasons for Agnes’s departure from the Midwest. He might even intimate…I cannot even say it.”
Paul waved his hand in the air, indicating that she need not continue. “A scandal. Something of that nature.”
He looked to Agnes, attempting to gauge her response to this unpleasant tale. There was none. Agnes maintained an expression of utter implacability. Her eyes simply shone their February gray. Her lips betrayed neither frown nor smile.
“We need this to go away,” said Fannie. “And we need it to go away quietly. Might you be able to assist us?”
What Paul was forced to say next was difficult. But it was unavoidable.
“I would be happy to introduce you to my partners. They are excellent attorneys, and you’d be in extremely capable hands.”
There was a moment of silence from the women. Neither appeared particularly accustomed to being turned down. It was as if they did not quite know how to respond to such a thing.
“I’m afraid it’s simply an issue of time,” continued Paul. “I don’t have any. George Westinghouse’s defense requires my full and unfettered attention.”
“It is some lawyer,” said Fannie, “who is uninterested in a new client.”
“Right now, I have one client. I have one case. I must win it.”
Agnes seemed faintly amused by Paul’s earnestness. If she was offended, she didn’t show it. She looked rather like she had already forgotten about Paul’s existence and was readying for her return to the great world of concerts and parties from which she had dropped in. Paul faced the unpleasant thought that she would go away so soon. When was the last time he had even spoken to a woman his age? But he knew what he had to do.
“Come along, darling,” said Fannie. “There are a hundred other attorneys on this block who would take your case with a moment’s notice.”
Paul’s further apologies were dismissed. No sooner had they arrived than they were gone, Agnes leaving in her wake the faintest scent of some exotic perfume he would never smell again.
He looked to the impossible stack of papers on his desk. This is what is required of the victorious, he reminded himself. He remained at the office late that night, till his writing hand was useless, and he didn’t sleep well.
A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with. A man is what he makes of himself.
—ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ERASTUS CRAVATH WAS not impressed. Of this he made his son well aware over the course of his visit to New York at the end of August.
Erastus was not impressed with Paul’s client. Coal lamps were good enough for the family home in Nashville.
He was not bowled over by Paul’s Fiftieth Street apartment. Erastus didn’t much like New York in the first place. He couldn’t imagine why Paul would want to live there. Erastus found the summer in Manhattan to be stifling. He found the city noisy, filthy, unpleasant. He found the conditions of the Jews, confined as they were to their Lower East Side tenements, to be appalling. He found the treatment of the Negroes in the Tenderloin to be even worse. Wasn’t typhoid a concern?
Erastus didn’t know why his son’s apartment still hadn’t been properly decorated after two years of habitation. He was reticent to ask at which church Paul spent his Sundays, because he knew what the answer would be.
He found Central Park overly manicured, like the fussy gardens of some ancient English lord. He hadn’t a taste for lobster, but if Paul wanted to spend the money gorging on shellfish, he wasn’t going to tell a twenty-seven-year-old how to feed himself.
Paul had been informed by letter of his father’s intention to visit. It would be his first trip to the city since Paul had lived there. He had business in the city. A meeting with some of the Fisk College donors—the few men in New York who possessed both strong moral convictions and the bank accounts necessary to support them. The old man had not even said that he was looking forward to seeing his son.
Paul in turn wrote Erastus that while he’d be happy to host him, the case was keeping him exceedingly busy of late. He wouldn’t have much time for entertaining. Erastus responded that he wasn’t sure what New York had to offer in the way of entertainment, but he didn’t think it would be much that he’d like anyhow.
When Erastus arrived, he lugged his baggage up the four flights to Paul’s apartment, huffing up the stairs while refusing help along the way. He was almost as tall as Paul, but he carried considerably more weight around the middle. His white beard, Paul noted, had grown so long that the fraying tips touched his shirtfront three buttons down.
Paul had cleared his afternoon of work, but Erastus said the journey had been exhausting and he’d be grateful for a few hours on Paul’s daybed. Paul did not have a daybed, he told his father, but the elder Cravath was welcome to Paul’s own bed for both the afternoon and the duration of his stay. So Erastus took to the mattress at two o’clock, while Paul puttered around the apartment idly. He pined for his office.
When Erastus awoke, Paul offered to take him out for a decent meal. But Erastus pointed out that that was a waste of money. He’d be more than content to make a stew. Where was the local butcher, so that he could get a good cut of flank steak?
Paul made the stupid mistake of admitting that he didn’t know. This allowed Erastus the invitation he required to comment that if only Paul had a wife, he might have some help with his shopping. The topic of Paul’s ceaseless bachelorhood had thus been broached.
Paul assured his father that he wanted a wife, that marriage wouldn’t be far off, but that at the present moment work had been rather consuming. Wouldn’t it be best to make a name for himself before he married?
“But you cannot,” his father said as he boiled onions in the kitchen, “be after the love of a woman who loves you for your name. You want one who loves you for the man behind it.”
Paul’s goal in this conversation was to see it ended as swiftly as possible. Receiving romantic advice from his father was like receiving financial advice from a junior Rockefeller: If one has never suffered for want of a thing, one has no conception of the trade-offs required in getting it.
Paul’s parents had a beautiful marriage. Of this he was convinced, although it confounded him. They’d met young and married instantly. His father could be irascible, his mother had a tendency to be even more judgmental than her husband, but together they were happy. And they excused each other’s faults. Their rigid moralism stopped at the foot of their Tennessee two-story. They granted each other a forgiving kindness they granted few others. It was only as he’d grown older, as he’d seen his friends fall into their own uninhabitable and desolate unions, that he’d realized that his parents enjoyed a rare privilege. It was a privilege that Paul had not yet been afforded.
In twenty-seven years, Paul had kissed four girls. He never spoke of this, of course. But he thought about it sometimes, and the memories gave him pleasure to recall. Since his passing encounter with Agnes Huntington two weeks earlier, he found these memories both more insistent and more bygone.
The first girl he’d kissed was Evelyn Atkinson, back in Nashville. Her papa ran a shipping company down by the docks. Paul took his schooling at home, but every afternoon he’d run to the riverside to meet up with teenagers his own age. He had kissed Evelyn late one night, as the wispy light from the cloud-shrouded Tennessee moon illuminated the dimples on her smiling cheeks. She was always smiling, that’s what he remembered most about her. Even while they kissed, the corners of her mouth remained raised.
By the time he’d kissed Gloria Robinson at the autumn tobacco festival, his taste for kissing was undeniable. He told no one. Other boys teased him out of jealousy, but only for what they imagined he’d done. For what they imagined girls had let him do.
Gloria’s younger sister Emily he’d kissed three times. Which he’d felt bad about, but as he was sure Gloria hadn’t told Emily, and Emily hadn’t told Gloria, and he’d told no one, there had been no harm committed. Still, it had probably not been his finest hour.
He met Molly Thompson at Oberlin. She was quiet and redheaded, prone to fits of ticklishness in the Ohio grass. They’d kissed regularly. His classmates were certain that more than kissing had gone on—rumors spread quickly in a school that small—but Paul and Molly knew the truth. They’d taken walks along Plum Creek, danced to the fiddlers in Allencroft Hall, and whispered the whole histories of their brief lives behind the sandstone houses along Lorain Street. She’d asked him to return with her to her family in Cincinnati after they’d graduated. Paul had informed Molly that he was going to New York. And that was that.
He’d received a letter from her once, while he’d been in law school. Her son was six months old and her husband was a senior clerk handling finances in the mayor’s office. She wondered, sometimes, how Paul was doing. He’d responded by sending her a clipping from the Columbia law journal. His article had won the annual third-year prize. He told her he’d soon be graduating first in his class.
She didn’t write a second time.
And that had been the extent of his wet-lipped career. Law school afforded little time for making the acquaintance of women, and his professional life even less. His bachelorhood had for some years been total.
Paul knew that he was old, at twenty-seven, to be still unmarried. Not impossibly old, but older than most women of marrying age would like. He was a young attorney but an old bachelor. Paul had made good choices in his life, and they were paying off. That he sometimes wondered what it would be like if he’d made other ones did not mean that he’d ever dream of taking any of them back.
He could not quite say any of this to his father. Paul’s gift with language did not extend to meaningful communication with the man who’d taught him to read. What would he gain by immodestly telling his father that he was by most accounts the most successful attorney of his generation, the lead litigator on the largest patent suit in the history of the United States? No matter what dragons Paul slayed, they would never be the kind to impress.
Erastus was never going to change. He wasn’t going to suddenly develop an interest in his son’s views of the world. He wasn’t going to start appreciating either Paul’s ambitions or his accomplishments. Nothing would be gained by exposing to his father the fraying nerves of his heart. He was content to maintain cordial relations with the old man. The push for anything more would upset the fragile equilibrium they’d finally reached.
