Back Bay (4 page)

“I have my orders,” said the maid.

“You have my orders!” Mrs. Carrington pulled the door open. “Come in, young man.”

Fallon didn’t know what he was stepping into, but he didn’t hesitate. Mrs. Carrington closed the door behind him, then turned to the maid.

“You may go about your business, Mrs. Harrison.”

“I shall contact Mr. Harrison immediately.” The maid turned and disappeared down the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen.

Mrs. Carrington laughed, a self-satisfied grunt. “She can’t get in touch with him. He drove my daughter into Boston to the theater, and then, I presume, headed for some local pub. I usually go with her, but I decided to stay so that you could see the old boy’s papers.”

She spoke of Pratt with such familiarity that Fallon had to remind himself Pratt had been dead for over a hundred and fifty years.

Katherine Pratt Carrington took Fallon by the arm and led him into the sitting room. Part of the original house, it had enormous windows adn twelve-foot ceilings, but the Queen Anne furniture, the fire, and the sound of classical music made it seem inviting.

“I hope you like Mozart, Mr. Fallon. I’m tackling one of his few concerti for single piano this week.” She nodded toward the baby grand beneath the window. “And right now, I’m letting Arthur Rubinstein give me a few pointers.”

Fallon saw the Philco radio-phonograph in the corner. The case was mahogany. The record was spinning at seventy-eight rpms.

“You don’t see record players like that too often,” he said.

“Forty years old,” she announced proudly. “We heard the news of Pearl Harbor right out of that speaker. My husband and I were sitting here reading the Sunday
Times
.

The children were outside, playing. When the bulletin ended, Henry looked me in the eye and said, ‘Now, by George, we’ll find out if this country has any character left after nine years of Roosevelt.’ Then he telephoned the War Department and tried to get his old commission back.”

She sat in the chair by the fireplace. A book of music was open on the arm of the chair. “I’ve been following along with Arthur,” she said, placing the book aside. “My daughter keeps telling me I should get a stereo machine, but some of the best performances I own are on old seventy-eights, and I don’t see any reason why I should get rid of my faithful Philco just to fit contemporary trends.”

The classic attitude for the Yankee lady, thought Fallon. “Do you play often?”

“It’s one of the few joys left for an old widow of seventy-eight.” She spoke without the self-pity Fallon would have expected, and he liked her for it.

He noticed on the mantel above her head a photograph. The hairstyles and clothes dated it in the mid-1930s. It showed a family—husband and wife, son and daughter—in the stern of a sailboat. The boy was about eight years old, and he held the tiller as though he’d been born to it. His father watched him with pride. His sister, about five, nestled in her mother’s arms and gazed admiringly at the men. The mother, Katherine Pratt Carrington, looked straight at the camera. She had been a beautiful woman.

“Now, Mr. Fallon, please sit down and tell me all about your work.”

He perched on the edge of the sofa and glanced unconsciously at his watch.

“Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time in the attic,” she said. “But first, spend a few minutes with an old lady. I see very few new faces anymore. Perhaps if Pratt Industries stock hadn’t started to fall, my daughter and my nephews might not keep me so tightly circumscribed.”

“I don’t understand the connection.”

“I have a few theories, but I shan’t trouble you with them.” She rang a bell, and the maid appeared in the doorway. “Bring us tea and cookies, dear.” Mrs. Carrington spoke with the perfect mixture of condescension and annoyance. The maid turned away, and Mrs. Carrington lowered her voice. “At least I can handle her.” As though there were others more difficult.

Fallon wondered if her battle with senility had begun. In the next half hour, she dispelled such thoughts. She talked almost
obsessively, as though she had spoken with no one in months, but her conversation was bright and witty. She talked about the Pratts, the War of 1812, the China trade, and she seemed especially interested in Fallon’s work. He realized that she had allowed him into the house because she was lonely.

“After you’ve gotten your doctorate at Harvard, what will you do?”

“I’m considering offers from two university history departments.” He didn’t tell her he wasn’t going to accept either position.

“I admire you, young man. It takes a great deal of courage to be a scholar, but it is the scholar who tells us about ourselves.”

Fallon hated being called a scholar. He smelled dry rot whenever he heard the word. He smiled and tugged at his tie again.

She sensed his discomfort and changed the subject. “I also admire your neckwear. Its pattern is the Eliot family coat of arms, is it not?”

“When I was an undergraduate, I lived in Eliot House.”

“So did my son. He graduated magna cum laude in government, class of ’49.”

“Does he work for Pratt Industries?”

“No. My son had a wonderful future, but his life was cut short when he was twenty-six.” Her eyes drifted toward the picture on the mantelpiece. Then she stood abruptly. She was not the sort to dwell on memories, happy or otherwise.

“Let’s go upstairs and see what Horace Taylor Pratt can tell us about Boston in 1814.”

She led Fallon up the stairs. On the first landing, Horace Taylor Pratt, painted by John Singleton Copley, stared into the entrance hall. The eyes were dark, the face long and ghostly pale. In front of Pratt, a map of China was spread on a table, and in his hand he gripped a walking stick as though it were a club with which to beat Canton into submission. He seemed to be frowning, but Fallon sensed that it was his natural expression.

“The patriarch himself,” said Mrs. Carrington. “He certainly looks like a sullen old bird, doesn’t he?”

As they walked past the bedrooms on the second floor, Fallon glimpsed mahogany and oak, four-posters and wardrobes, and
nothing less than fifty years old. At the end of the hallway, he saw an exquisite Chinese chest of lacquered wood and mother-of-pearl inlay. Above the box was the portrait of another Pratt, painted in the mid-nineteenth century.

“That’s Artemus Pratt I, my great-grandfather,” explained Mrs. Carrington. “He built Searidge and secured the fortune.”

Fallon was beginning to feel as though he were touring a very small, exclusive museum.

At the top of the stairs on the third floor, a Governor Winthrop desk covered the entrance to the attic. Fallon moved the desk aside, Mrs. Carrington opened the wall panel, and they climbed eight more steps. The attic smelled of mothballs and dust, and it overflowed with clothes, furniture, books, mementoes from World’s Fairs and Harvard football games, and garment bags containing uniforms from most of America’s wars. A saber of Civil War vintage hung from one of the rafters, and scattered through the piles of junk were metal boxes and filing cabinets filled, Fallon imagined, with the family papers. On one box, a label read “Artemus Pratt’s correspondence,” and another, “The Diaries of Abigail Pratt Bentley.”

Fallon heard a small motor begin to hum somewhere in the room.

“The dehumidifier,” explained Mrs. Carrington. “It helps to protect things up here. I have occasionally considered donating all this to the Harvard libraries. I’m told that the Pratt papers and portrait would make an excellent tax write-off, but I prefer to keep them here, at least until I die. Moreover, the rest of the family is very protective of our past.” She laughed. “As though people long dead can rise up and smite us if we don’t watch over their privacy.”

“Have other historians examined these papers?” Fallon was hoping he was the first.

“There have been a few over the years. Samuel Eliot Morison examined a good deal of the Pratt material for his
Maritime History of Massachusetts
.”

“That was published in the twenties.”

“Good Lord, has it been that long? Searidge was still a summer house in the twenties. Henry and I moved up here permanently in
1934. The Depression was making the city such an unsavory place for raising children.”

“Was Morison the last one?”

Mrs. Carrington thought for a moment. “We’ve certainly been bothered often enough. You know, news reporters looking to fill Sunday supplements, snoops of all sorts. But only people with serious intent have seen these papers, and no one outside the family in the last thirty years.”

“I’m honored.” Fallon was not above flattery.

“Now, then, you may look only at the papers of Horace Taylor Pratt—his logs, his letters, his ledgers.

“I think you’ll find them all in excellent condition.” She opened a great steamer trunk in the middle of the room and took out several metal boxes, each of them labeled and indexed. “My grandson Christopher has been cataloguing everything we have. It’s a hobby of his.”

Fallon opened one of the boxes. Inside, he found piles of correspondence, much of it crumbling to dust, and a package of desiccant keeping the dust dry.

“It is now two-fifteen,” said Mrs. Carrington. “Mr. Harrison and my daughter will be returning at five-fifteen. I want you gone well before then. And remember, you may examine only what I have set out before you.”

Mrs. Carrington went downstairs. Fallon dragged the boxes over to a dormer, where the light was better, and he sat down. He no longer enjoyed the routine research his work required, but when he read old letters, Fallon felt a sort of prurient excitement, as though he were eavesdropping on a private conversation. With the Mozart piano concerto, played by Katherine Pratt Carrington, floating up the stairs and the fog pressing against the window, he began.

For the next two hours, he immersed himself in the letters of Horace Taylor Pratt, which had been collected from his correspondents after his death and preserved for his descendants. In most of his letters, Pratt discussed business and little else. The movement of goods, the speed of his ships, the activities of his competitors and his government were his primary concerns. But one packet of letters contained something more.

From 1802 to 1807, Pratt’s older son, Horace, had been in China as the chief foreign officer for Pratt Shipping and Mercantile. Letters of father and son had been filed together, and they revealed men of strikingly similar dimension. The Pratts discussed business, but they also wrote regularly of their hopes for their family and the future of the company.

“Young Horace III is now eight years old,” wrote Horace II from Canton in 1807, “and we are building him a bright future indeed. I see limitless potential for Pratt Shipping and Mercantile, both here in China and around the globe. Every penny we make is helping us to grow stronger and making our future secure. From what you told me in your last letter, however, it seems that President Jefferson may present problems. An embargo on European trade would certainly be a severe blow to us all. I’m sure most American shippers would rather trade with everyone and take their chances with the British and French than rot in port until Napoleon is defeated. We must hope this President keeps his head. In any event, I feel that it is time for me to return to Boston. I have done and learned all that I can here. I know that I can now be of service to you at home, especially if we must contend with an embargo.”

Six months later, Pratt received his son’s letter and answered it immediately. “I agree, Horace, that it is time for you to return to my right hand. You have been too long away from us, but you have done us proud. I am sending Anson Dabney, a trusted Boston assistant, out to replace you. If you are not already at sea and running for Boston, take the next ship. But bring no goods. The bastard Jefferson has closed American ports to all foreign trade. He thinks he can make the British and French leave us alone by hiding from them both like a frightened schoolboy. I say we take sides with England—they rule the seas, after all—and fight against France, if we must. ’Twould be better than cowering in our boots.

“As for Horace III, I cannot wait to see him. I hope that you have been raising him the way I raised you—to fear nothing but the Lord, to believe in himself and his family, and to prepare himself for the mantle of leadership that he will inherit from you, just as you will inherit it from me.

“On your return voyage, instruct him to study the activities of the shipmaster (probably Chapman, if you return on the
Pemberton
), who tries to anticipate the changes in the wind and set his canvas accordingly. It’s a good way to live one’s life and keep a full league ahead of the competition.”

Peter Fallon was fascinated. He took notes as quickly as he read. Statistics in a cargo muster might illuminate the nature of Pratt’s trade, but in this letter he was revealing the motivations behind it.

“Impress upon your son that he will be engaged in a holy war, that by extending the arm of New England business to the heathen places on this earth, he is spreading the Word of the Lord. He must be forever vigilant, forever seeking new ways to use the gifts that the Lord has helped us to wrest from the sea.”

Pratt had been raised in the Calvinist tradition that encouraged the merchant and viewed commerce as the most noble profession. Fallon wondered how many nineteenth-century fortunes were built on God’s will before Social Darwinism offered a more scientific justification for the pursuit of wealth. But he knew that with Calvin behind them, the Pratts had contributed mightily to the economic growth of New England.

At four o’clock, Fallon heard an automobile pull up in the driveway below. Through the window, he watched a young woman with blond hair climb out of a sports car and run into the house. She was too young to be Mrs. Carrington’s daughter, and the fog was now too thick for Fallon to notice her beauty. He returned to his work.

The final letter in the China envelope came from Captain Richard Chapman of the
Pemberton
, a Pratt ship. It was dated April 23, 1808.

“Mr. Pratt, I have sent this letter ahead on a faster ship because I believe it better that you know now the fate of your son. Moreover, I could not bear to tell you myself, and this letter provides me a coward’s escape. The
Pemberton
is now put in at Rio Gallegos, on the Argentine coast, for repairs. The foretop and a good deal of rigging were carried away in a heavy blow off Cape Horn. We were running—nay, flying—before the wind on our easterly passage when a heavy squall struck from the north. Such winds
are rare in these latitudes, and we were caught without adequate preparation.”