Gilded Mountain, page 11
“Last week I heard your daddy sing,” he said, still regarding me.
“You did?”
“He sure can sing, Jocko. He plays the fiddle too, I heard.”
“He does.” I smiled, thinking of Papa fiddling. “He’s a good musician.”
“Frenchy’s a good man,” said Jasper. “Everybody likes Jack Pelletier.”
Not boss Tarbusch, I didn’t say.
Jasper finished his coffee. When he pushed back his chair, he pointed to the drawer storing Marcus’s letter. “So let me ask you again,” he said. “ ‘Anxious to get away.’ What do you think that’s about? Why would the Gradys want to leave us?”
The question intimidated me. Jasper himself did, a college man reading Virgil in Latin, the princeling of Elkhorne, asking my opinion. It seemed a risk to offer one.
“To be with their sons?”
“But ‘anxious to get away’?” Jasper said, sounding betrayed. “It would be a hardship if they left. See now, Easter raised me right alongside Cal and Marcus. Gradys have been with us—forever. They’re loyal to our family because—Easter’s even been to Paris with Dad, to show off her cooking. My father paid to send Caleb and Marcus to Hampton Institute. And now they think of leaving? If it weren’t for my father, Marcus wouldn’t’ve ever have met this Dearfield fellow—Toussaint Jackson, or Booker Washington either.”
“I am not familiar with who that is,” I said.
Jasper picked up the Moonstone City Record and pointed to a headline: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AT DENVER. “Even our local rag recognizes him as the most famous Negro in the country! Right alongside this Professor Du Bois. W.E.B. Du Bois.” Due Boyce was how he said it, tapping his book.
“Du Bois?” I said (Dew Bwa). “Is he French?”
“He’s American. Negro. A Harvard man. Wrote this book. Caleb Grady gave it to me.” He showed me the title, The Souls of Black Folk. “When I’m done with it, I’ll loan it to you.”
“I’d like that. Thank you.”
The moment turned strange. Jasper’s neck flushed as if the subject were not a discussion of books but something else, the heat in my own face.
“Say, Sylvie,” he said, “will you be going around town touring with Madame tomorrow morning? For this project of hers?”
“She asked me to take notes.”
“Well, lucky me,” he said. “I’ll be glad to have a fellow sufferer along.”
Suffering how? A drive on the red leather seats of the Countess’s high-wheeled carriage sounded nice. After he left, I picked up the Record to see what K. T. Redmond had reported.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AT DENVER
White men, prominent in Denver circles, showed respect by their attendance at a recent lecture by Booker T. Washington, the brilliant colored educator. It may be safely said that Mr. Washington shows in his makeup much of the Divine. Emancipated at 10, working in a coal mine, as a child he showed serious thirst for knowledge. He heard of the college at Hampton and walked 800 miles, working along the way, and, reaching the school, was made a janitor. He went on to become a leader, an example and benefactor to his own people and the same to the white race. Those who refuse to recognize Mr. Washington are sadly deficient in the virtues they refuse to honor.
Mr. Washington was certainly inspiring, but I didn’t understand then why Jasper Padgett would be so interested in him, or in the Gradys’ plans for their own town. What interested me was Jasper himself.
Chapter Nine
OURS WAS A SURREY CARRIAGE of mismatch that morning. Our stalwart leader was the Countess in her summer whites, her ruffled parasol. Beside her on the velvet upholstery was myself in a preposterous nuisance of a hat she gave me “to protect your milky complexion.” Bisou perched wagging between us. In the backseat was Jace Padgett, glowering behind his spectacles, brooding over that book about souls. On the bench in front was John Grady driving in his formal suit, with the steady cheerful expression he always wore.
“Good morning! A fine day, a fine day! How you feeling, Missus Padgett? Miss Sylvie? What a day, Lord.”
At the time I thought John Grady was the sunniest man. But after my education at the hands of Gradys and Padgetts, I understood his cheer as a deception or mask, a shield or a way not to go mad: his soul and his very body protected behind songs and whistling, to disarm threats and worse. Smiling was a disguise of appeasement I’d used myself, and was advised to do more of it. We wheeled down the drive and into town. Grady hummed and Inge narrated. “Today, mes amis, we interview the people in the camp, to ask how the Sociology can make improvements, to see with our own eyes how they live like les misérables.”
“Can’t wait,” said sarcastic Jasper.
A basket of candy boxes sat at Grady’s feet. Madame and I had spent the previous afternoon tying them with gold ribbon. Inge’s idea was to hand them out to the families, “to make friends of the habitants.”
“To make dupes of them, you mean,” said Jace. “Bribes.”
“Bribe?” she said. “Non, it is scientific. Kindness is proved to make the people attach to the Company, to be loyal. It is to keep out the terrible syndicats de travail.”
Unions, she meant. The insult rankled me, but I still did not defend my father or George Lonahan, silenced again by money. At five dollars a week, I’d have a lovely nest egg at summer’s end, and was not ready to risk losing it by opening my mouth.
As we rode along, Inge pointed out how Moonstone was prospering: the crews hammering up another mill shed by the river, the schoolhouse with its white stone foundations rising next to the bank. “The Company donated that marble,” Inge said proudly.
“Not like you can’t just pick it up free off the ground around here,” Jasper said. “Lying around for the taking.”
“That would be stealing,” Inge said, “off Company property.”
“How about school books?” Jace asked. “Did we donate books?”
“Good idea, monsieur. Books, of course,” she said. “Write books, Sylvie.”
“Write books.” That’s how the words are printed in my notebook, like a command.
Outside the Mercantile, Mr. Koble stood smoking in the sunlight; Inge waved. “Good morning!” she called to K. T. Redmond’s friend Dottie Weeks, who stood outside the bakery, shaking a white cloud of flour out of her apron. I pulled my hat brim low for fear K.T. next door would poke her long nose out the window to sniff, questions blazing like guns. But the shade was down, the sign read Closed. Likely Susie Society was rootling around town, foraging for stories. Perhaps she would like to write about Inge’s philosophy of Industrial Betterment. (Later, when I told her about it, she derided it as welfare capitalism with a disgusted shake of her head.)
The Countess went smiling at everybody we passed, seeming to enjoy their gaping at the red leather seats and fringed canopy of our surrey.
“See there, the new streetlight!” Inge pointed to a bulb dangling from a wire across the intersection. “Soon we will have the sewer and electric all through town.”
“Swell,” Jasper said. He turned a page.
“You are not impressed?” Inge said. “Surely it is impressive to make a town only in two years! Sylvie, ange, don’t you agree?”
“Ange is French for angel, no? Sylvie the angel,” Jace said. “Not like your friend Adele.” He whispered in my ear: “Beware the houseguests, angel. Beware their continental ways.”
“Arrêtes, monsieur, stop,” said Inge, “you are terrible.”
Maybe he was terrible or arrogant, but also, he was fascinating. His eyes pricked my back through the upholstery. I stole a look at him, and he grinned as if I were in on a joke. I was happy to be in on it, but—his warning did not feel funny. Beware.
Inge announced: “Here we are at the Little Italy.”
“You mean Dagotown,” Jace said. “As my father calls it.”
“My father too. I wish he wouldn’t.” I spoke without thinking and then regretted it. It was a risk to talk about my family while these Padgetts were discussing les misérables, the squalid homes of the workers. They might propose a trip to Quarrytown, where they’d see our rickety shack, casting their judgment and charity candy. If they saw, even that platter of a hat could not hide who I was.
The cabins by the mill were nailed out of logs and canvas. Plank-board paths led over the mud to dark doorways. Chickens scratched in the dirt behind mesh wire fences where lines of laundry hung in the breezy sunlight. Women in kerchiefs tended their kettles over outdoor fires, yelled threats at the children rolling in the dirt. Two mongrel dogs panted on a porch, strings of drool off their jowls. Bisou snarled at them from the safety of the bench.
“Stop here, please, Grady,” Inge said.
Mr. Grady handed us down. Charcoal fumes mixed with the stench of the outhouse. Flies buzzed around a barrel of garbage. Inge wrinkled her nose and went up the walk, knocked on the door. “Buongiorno,” she called. “Hallo?”
A sunburnt woman with pale eyes answered, her cheekbones shiny with sweat, her head wrapped in a scarf. “Cosa vuoi?” she asked, alarmed to see the elegant Inge on her porch. Her hands were stained purple. When she dried them on her apron, the color came off in red streaks. “La Contessa!” She ducked her head, overcome. “Oh, I don’t believe. Benvenuto!” Children crowded behind her. Her apron rounded over her swollen stomach. “Sono Signora Santorini.”
“Please don’t worry, Mrs. Santorini,” Inge reassured her. “We are here only for the social visit, non ti preoccupare. Here is Mr. Padgett.”
Mrs. Santorini stared at Jasper in astonishment. “The son?” she asked, striving for English. “Mr. Junior? Il figlio.”
“Jasper Padgett,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He bowed so elaborately that Mrs. Santorini giggled like a girl and covered her mouth of missing teeth.
Inge invited herself inside. “Observe, Jace. Write everything, Sylvie.” But Jace excused himself to read his book on the porch. “Il me fruste,” Inge muttered.
Frustrated, I wrote, and followed into the Santorinis’ house, full of children.
“Filomena, Giovanni, Margherita,” the signora introduced them with a hand on her heart. “Maria, Anna, Pietro.” The two littlest ones played with no pants on, like Nipper, putting rocks in a bucket with a clatter.
Inge smiled and touched their curls with a tenderness that made me miss my brother. “Do your bambinos have a bath?” She mimed a scrub. “Il bagno?”
“Sì, sì.” The signora wrung her apron. Embarrassment hung in the air like the smell of grease and clung to me. I thought of hiding by the stove in the big barrel. It was full of dark red juice, pips and skins over it in a sieve, the pressings of grapes.
“Make note,” Inge said, pointing.
Grapes, I wrote. Wine.
The Countess inspected corners, sniffed the air, darted a look at a chamber pot, the settlement of flies on the screen, a row of wine jugs on a shelf. “Make note.”
I did so whenever she lifted her eyebrows to signal me. What did not warrant her notice were the flour-sack curtains in a rose pattern, the mason jar of daisies on the sill, the bargello embroidery on the table runner, the picture of the Virgin tacked on the wall. When I passed it, I crossed myself by habit. Hail Mary pleine de grâce, but I was not full of grace, only squirming and uneasy, as if a bucket of eels swam in my bloodstream. The children stared. At me writing, at Inge swiveling her benevolent blue gaze. How did these Santorinis see us? As invaders, I thought, judges who could hurt them.
Mrs. Santorini pinched her lips between two fingers. She appeared desperate to speak but afraid of the words in her mouth. “Please, signora. Already we pay rent. I have ricevuta. We pay.”
“Don’t worry,” Inge repeated, her face alight with the calm of her station, the power of her kindness. “We’re the Sociology Department. Siamo amici. Sylvie, the gifts!”
I took the cover off our basket to remove one of the small candy boxes. Inge presented it. The children crowded around as Mrs. Santorini opened the packet and gasped at the sweets in their colored foils.
“Caramella!” Mrs. Santorini fanned herself and placed her hand on her throat in a choke of gratitude. “Oh, La Contessa, thank you. Mille grazie.”
“Now, Signora,” Inge said brightly, “be sure to bathe the bambinos three times a week, with plenty of soap. Here are the instructions. Sylvie? Please, la brochure.”
I thrust forward the pamphlet: “Hygienic Practices for the Family.”
Mrs. Santorini waved it away. “Sorry, sorry. No English.”
“Leave it anyway, Sylvie.” Inge whispered, “Make a note: traduisez tout.”
Translate, I wrote, but knew that to interpret between the cabins and the manor was nearly impossible. How could you wash with soap if you had no soap?
Back in the carriage, the kind Countess waved the air and wrinkled her darling nose. “You should have seen it, Jasper!” she said. “Déguelasse, like the pigs’ house. Maybe better tear it down. At least they must move the latrines more far away!”
“But the winter, Madame,” I said quietly. “The snow is so deep. If the privy’s far, you could freeze.” Her words had flushed me with shame and a wish to defend them, the Santorinis, all of the cabin dwellers.
“You’re correct,” she said, reconsidering. “That is exactement why we need the sewer system. Everybody so crowded. Eight of them in that cabin! Nine? Those naked children. They don’t even have a toy. And the liquor! Did you see? The bottles? These Santorinis are, what do you call? Bootlickers.”
I tried not to laugh. Later I’d recognize the actual bootlickers: toadies who did the bloody work of the bosses. “It’s bootleggers,” I told Inge.
“Heaven forfend! Bootleggers!” Jasper cried from the backseat. “Demon rum! Bathe them all in champagne, I say.”
“Jace, please,” Inge said. “They’re making wine out of anything—even weeds!”
“Let’s turn around,” Jace said. “Let’s see if the vino is as good as the Bordeaux in the old man’s cellar. I’m thirsty.”
I stifled a smile, and he saw he had me as an audience. Kindred spirits.
“The main problem in every camp is the liquor,” Inge said.
I wish I’d said: The main problem is the danger. The pay and the prices. The crowding and the cold. But I believed it wasn’t my place. My place was in the cabins or the Cardboard Palace, unless I could find a better one.
Jasper rested his book and, as if he’d read my mind, said, “The main problem is the men are not paid beans.”
They aren’t! I cheered him silently.
“Of course they are paid!” Inge turned on him. “Who tells you this idea? They drink all the wages. Spend it on whiskey.”
“And why shouldn’t they?” he said. “What’s so bad about that?”
“Because we dry the town. Those type of people—they drink all day. They get an injury. They don’t work. Sociology is the answer! I said to your father, we need a clubhouse for the men. To only serve cider. We’ll have the amusements. Billiards and card games, baseball. That’s what they need.”
“Let’s ask Sylvie what they need,” Jasper said.
“I just take notes,” I said, dodging, still hoping the notes themselves would be a tool, to prove what was needed, a way to get it. “It’s not for me to say.”
But Jace Padgett could say whatever he wanted, and he did. All that afternoon in our bickering wagon, he held forth. I liked listening to him, his learned righteousness. “Men can’t live off scrip and scrap and fourteen-hour shifts,” he said. “But my father doesn’t want to hear it.”
“It is not true. I am right, Sylvie?” Inge pressed me. “They are paid, of course.”
“Tin,” Jasper said. “Scrip for the Company store. Am I right, Miss Pelletier?”
Pinned between them, I shrugged, my answer revealed by my hands tipped open, empty as my father’s pockets. I smiled at Jace, then smiled at Inge, listening with the attention of a spy.
“Inge, if you would read the local news—” Jasper started.
“That paper, pah!” Inge said. “She hates the business. She hates the success.”
“What she hates is that we don’t pay the boys overtime. She hates that Bowles charges workers rent—to live in tents. In the dead of winter.”
“Where else can they live?” Inge cried. “We build as fast as we get lumber.” She fumed on the seat beside me, her effort to convert Jasper to the sociological cause melting in the noonday sun. “Anyway, this winter we’ll have a skating exhibition. And the ski races. Just like our villages in Europe.”
“We’ll all have to learn to yodel.” Jasper gave a comical yodeling call. Inge burst out laughing. Grady slapped his knee. The air felt lighter now, even as they argued.
“I want for you to appreciate the sociology,” the Countess said. “If we make the comfortable village, the habitants don’t strike. They work.”
“Like slaves,” Jasper said.
“Slaves, phh,” she said. “That’s the past.”
Perhaps that past is where the bosses got their training, I did not say.
Jasper brandished his book. “Dr. Du Bois would say it’s not quite past.”
“You’re a parrot to the Yankee professeurs,” said Inge. “Your father despairs it. I need you to persuade him: The sociology is the future. He’ll listen to you.”
“Never has before,” Jasper said.
All that morning, Inge and I toured the village while Jace stayed in the carriage, talking with John Grady in the shade. At times he read aloud from that book by Du Bois, while Grady tolerated him, nodding politely, Umm-hmm. Uh-huh. You don’t say. It was plain there was nothing Jace could say about The Souls of Black Folk that Grady didn’t know. It was Jace (and I myself, later) who found revelation in those pages, and the inspiration that would set him on the road to folly.
In and out of the cabins, the Countess questioned the residents. What do you need? She listened, her face an agony of compassion, her hand on a shoulder, a forearm, the Samaritan’s touch. The little ones sat on her elegant lap and played with her necklace and picked their noses. They kissed her cheek with smudgy lips. She combed their hair with her fingers.
