Ghost Town (10 page)

—He did not say anything to me, said Julius.

—What then? Tell me!

She was fierce and urgent, clutching his arm as he shambled along the street, people surging past them, all in far too much of a hurry to take in the spectacle of this tall disheveled youth and the lovely girl hanging onto his arm and peering into his face, demanding that he tell her what was wrong.

—Tell me, Julius, or I shall cry!

The effect was immediate. Oh, but to make her
cry
—! Julius was horrified. He stopped dead and stared at her. The crowds streaming along the sidewalk now began to take notice of them, for they had become an obstacle and had to be steered round.

—No, don’t cry!

—Then tell me.

So he told her that his father wanted him to bring her to the house.

—To the house?

She thought about this a moment.

—Well, why not? she said.

Bold girl, she did not think the prospect so bad. She
wanted
to meet his father, she said, and his sisters too. Why should she not? What had she to fear? Julius said he did not know.

—Then why so blue?

Then he told her that Charlotte had said that their father would try to break up their friendship. Annie was indignant. Why would he want to do that? she said, though I think she knew the answer. They walked on in silence and turned down Broadway. They became aware of the roar of the great thoroughfare.

—I don’t know, said Julius at last.

—Then stop it. It will be alright. Never mind what Charlotte says.

This was new. It had not occurred to Julius to never mind what Charlotte said, and the idea that Annie might possess an authority equal to his sister’s came upon him with some force. Always he had deferred to Charlotte, assuming in her a wisdom he would never possess. To think that Annie Kelly also partook of that mysterious female knowledge, and that he could turn to her now—to Julius this had the impact of divine revelation. In that instant he abandoned all dread at the prospect of her coming to the house. He remembered his father’s affection, and knew that papa would see what he, Julius, saw in her. Charlotte was wrong! He said this to Annie, but now the girl would say not a word against this sister she had not yet met.

I have given some thought to Annie Kelly’s reaction to this proposed meeting with Julius’ father. There are those who believe that the girl was motivated simply by avarice, and recognized in the invitation an opportunity to move closer to what really interested her, that is, the van Horn money. But I do not think she was so mercenary as that. I believe she was simply curious, and thought she had nothing to lose. She may have wondered idly whether something to her advantage would come of it, but I do not think she had any sort of a plan. It would be wrong to be too cynical about the girl.

The sisters greeted her at the front door. It seems they took a liking to each other at once, and if Annie had started to feel at all apprehensive about the evening, her worries were quickly put to rest. The three girls hurried her into their parlor and made her welcome. They hung up her bonnet and admired her dress, a homemade garment of green velvet. Charlotte sat with her on the little sofa by the window, and as Annie looked about her, impressed by all the books and paintings, and the open piano with pages of music loosely stacked on top, she gave her a cigarette.

—You smoke, of course, she said.

—Charlotte says we must all smoke, cried Sarah, but you don’t have to!

Worldly though she was, Annie had never smoked a cigarette, but it seemed a good time to start. Hester and Sarah clapped with delight as she took her first puff and of course spluttered and coughed and turned red in the face.

—It isn’t easy, said Charlotte. You must practise.

—It’s horrid! shouted Hester. You see, Charlotte, she hates it!

—I don’t hate it, said Annie, recovering, but I have not the gift.

But she tried again, with more success.

—Charlotte told Julius he may not join us, said Sarah, because we wanted to have you to ourselves. Do you mind?

—I do not, said Annie. It’s nice, us all girls together. Is it your own room?

—We sometimes allow Julius in here, said Charlotte, if we want to be entertained.

—Well, he’s a grand entertainer, said Annie—and so it went on. Soon they were asking her the question uppermost in their minds, which was how she could go in front of men without any clothes on, and she told them she was sure that
God didn’t object, for hadn’t He made her body in the first place?

—But you mustn’t tell father, said Hester, because he wouldn’t understand.

—What am I to say then? said Annie.

—Say nothing, said Charlotte, and I will do the talking.

A little later there came a knock at the door.

—Go away, Julius, they shouted, and hooted with laughter. But he came in anyway, wreathed in large grins because his sisters approved of his friend. By the time they heard the dinner gong they were all quite delighted with one another.

They passed into the hall. Coming down the stairs from his library was Noah, dressed for dinner, and behind him came Rinder. Both men paused, and Annie gazed up at them. The hilarity which had followed them out of the parlor dissipated. Noah was grave. Not for a moment did he betray his feelings. He already disapproved of her, in a sense he feared her. It was impossible for him to think of a girl called Kelly without the taint of her race upon her, and in the New York of those days that taint bespoke lives of squalor and drunkenness in the crowded tenements of the Points and the Hook. This was the burden of prejudice with which
Noah regarded his son’s friend from the staircase of his home that evening, and her slim, straight figure and flawless skin served only to sharpen his suspicion, for now he understood that the threat she posed was greater than he had first imagined.

He continued down the staircase and gave the girl his hand. Annie showed proper respect, the father’s stiff formality being exactly what she expected of a man of his station, and as the sisters filled the air with chatter so as to steer them through the first fraught phase of the encounter she took Noah’s proffered arm and together they walked into the dining room. Julius grinned at the ceiling and bit his lip, and as for Rinder, he had given little thought to this Irish girl whom Charlotte was so eager to meet. But all that changed when he saw the girl. For he was at once strongly attracted to her, and for the rest of the evening kept a furtive eye on her.

Noah showed nothing of his feelings. He was surprised to discover that the girl was not frightened of him, and found himself after a while feeling almost affectionate toward her. In other circumstances he might have made much of her, for she lacked what he regarded as the peculiar
foolishness of his own sheltered daughters. At one point he scanned the table and realized that other than himself and Rinder she was the only real adult present, for even Charlotte knew little more than theaters and picture galleries and drawing rooms. But he knew that her confidence came of a greater level of contact with men, and this disturbed him. He did not know that the girl modeled for artists but he sensed her lack of proper feminine modesty. No, she would not do, not for his son, and it was with some distaste that he recognized how unpleasant it was going to be to break the thing up. He did not want to hurt Julius but it could not go on, this he had known since the boy told him in Washington Square who she was. His touch would have to be sure and subtle, and he was irritated by the prospect.

None of which was apparent to his children. Was it apparent to Annie? I think not. I do not believe she had encountered a man like Noah van Horn before. She did not know how such men felt with regard to the assimilation into their established world of the immigrant masses. Noah employed Irishmen on his wharves, his ships, his building sites and in his warehouses, and while he knew many who were sober and
industrious men, nonetheless he believed them at root to be a shiftless, dishonest people. He would employ them, but allow one of their women to draw close to his children, to befriend his daughters and walk out with his son—it must be stopped, and the sooner the better. None of this, as I say, was apparent to the young people who sat at his table that night, and when dinner ended and Noah retired once more to his library with Rinder, they decided with joy and relief that the thing had gone off splendidly.

Noah was nothing if not decisive, but for once in his life he found himself reluctant to do what he knew he must. He spoke of the matter to his son-in-law that very night. He told Rinder what was on his mind.

—She won’t do, he said.

Rinder himself came of immigrant stock. He had clawed his way into society, had become a partner in the House of van Horn, had married into the family—all good reasons why others must be prevented from doing the same. He must thwart this upstart girl, despite the fact that she aroused him—or
because
she did, perhaps—or the family would begin to look like a way-station for every aspiring nobody in New
York. He was astonished that his father-in-law could have allowed the thing to progress this far, but he understood the reason.

—Why not leave it to me? he said.

It went no further that night. Charlotte appeared in the library some moments later to ask Rinder please to take her home. I next see the two men in Noah’s office in the warehouse on Old Slip. I see Noah at the window, frowning, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. I see him turning toward the younger man.

—Leave it to you?

He regarded his partner with some suspicion. In all the years they had known each other Noah had often been surprised by Rinder. A generation younger than Noah, Rinder regarded the city as a lawless territory where ferocity, speed and cunning counted most: a state of nature. More than once he had made the argument to Noah that they served the market, and what the market demanded they must supply, for if they did not then the next man would and he would prosper and they would fail.

Noah disliked thinking of himself as a servant of the market, as a servant of anything, in fact,
but he recognized an ugly truth in what Rinder believed, even if he no longer acknowledged the brutal rapacity of his own activities as a young man. But why should Rinder take care of the Annie Kelly problem?

—I know girls like that, he said.

He had identified precisely what troubled Julius’ father: “girls like that” were girls who preyed on gullible young men. Rinder was closer than Noah to the street, where such girls flourished. Noah saw the point. He assumed there would be a payment made.

—Not overly generous, he said.

—Of course not.

—And Julius must know nothing.

He held the other man’s eye. A profound importance attached to Julius remaining ignorant of the scheme.

—He must think she has tired of him.

—He will know nothing of it.

—You relieve me of a tiresome burden.

Rinder bowed slightly. So stiff was he, this thin, ageless creature in his black clothes you might almost expect to hear a creaking sound when he bowed from the waist. Rinder’s ambition, his sole ambition, was to assume control of all that Noah van Horn possessed. It had been
his habit in recent years to take on whatever Noah found distasteful, and the problem of Annie Kelly was distasteful in the extreme.

Rinder left the room and Noah settled at his desk with a sense of relief which was not altogether comfortable. He was still troubled. It was an instance of an almost imperceptible slackening in his control of his own affairs that he should so quickly have allowed his partner to assume responsibility in this matter. Noah was at last growing tired. For more than forty years he had run the House of van Horn and overseen its steady expansion. He was now among the wealthiest men in New York. He believed that in a few more years he would retire. To travel, perhaps, and to read. He had for years wished that he had more time to spend in his library. He wanted to study the ancient civilizations, for he was curious to draw comparisons between those civilizations and his own. He believed that the American people would in time be as great as any in human history, and he wanted to spend a year in Europe to visit the old sites, the ruins. He would take Julius with him, perhaps set him up with a teacher in Paris, or in one of the German studios. Alone each evening in his library, Noah thought often of this happy prospect,
and Rinder, he was confident, would make it possible by assuming the responsibilities he was finding increasingly irksome.

So Noah permitted himself a sigh of relief. Five more years, he thought, possibly four. Julius would then be twenty-two. He would take the boy to Europe and they would see together what the Old World had to offer the New. He had recently read that the coming of the great cosmopolitan city marked the beginning of the last phase of a civilization, the city being a sure symptom of imminent degeneration and decay. As he sat there in his office on Old Slip, he lifted his head from the papers before him and regarded the wharves and piers built out into the East River to north and south as far as the eye could see, and from the vessels crowded at those wharves a forest of masts rising high as church spires in the shimmering air of the morning. More shipping lay at anchor out in the river and the Upper Bay beyond, among them his own clipper ships, narrow, high-masted vessels which crossed the Atlantic faster even than the steam-driven packets; and seeing all this he knew that what lay ahead was not the first stage of decay but the last preparation for greatness, or more than greatness, for
New York’s triumphant assumption, rather, of the mantle of distinction of being not only the pre-eminent city of America, but of the world.

He then reflected that he must be getting old. He had never had time to think thoughts of such foolish grandiosity when he was a young man. With a snort of amusement he went back to work.

A week later Julius appeared in the studio and discovered that there was no model for the life class. The students were working from pieces of plaster statuary. He approached Jerome Brook Franklin.