Thunder City (21 page)

Dolan remembered he was a politician in time to conceal his surprise. Where did the man get his information?

“Clumsy, Big Jim. Childish. I wish you’d come to me instead of this baboon Whitney.”

This time Dolan could not help himself. His jaw worked up and down twice before he got words out. “You can’t want Ford to fail. You’ve got money tied up in his company.”

“I have money tied up in Harlan Crownover. The difference is great.” Another long silence went by, at the end of which Borneo snatched up the newspaper, dropped it back into the drawer, and slammed the drawer shut with a bang that made his visitor flinch. He sat back, looking at Dolan and twisting the gold ring around his little finger. “Now. Let us discuss how we are going to retrieve your good name, accomplish our common objective, and get back to the business of making a great deal of money.”

A
BNER
C
ROWNOVER
III
, ELDEST
son of Abner II and Edith, was what was called, in his time and in the city in which he lived, “a creature of habit.” The term “obsessive compulsive,” while familiar to that specialized area of the scientific community that concerned itself with abnormalities of the brain, was not known to the general public. The principal manifestation of this condition in young Abner was in his complete inability to alter or eliminate any social habit of long standing. He could not, for example, wear his gray suit on any Wednesday, that being the day that he had stood for the final fitting of his first good black suit, and had worn it directly from his tailor’s to a board meeting, two years earlier. He could not bring himself to ask his carriage driver to detour one block off his daily route to the office even to visit his regular smoke shop when he had run out of cigars, to which he was strongly addicted and endured savage headaches whenever he went without one longer than two hours; the route had been recommended to him by his father-in-law the week he moved into his marital home as the most efficient, and any deviation from it must compromise its integrity.

These and other idiosyncracies were known to most of his friends and business associates, who dismissed them as eccentric privileges afforded the sons of wealthy and powerful men. Only a very few of those with whom he worked—and these had been sworn to secrecy through a combination of salary enhancements and threats originating from the office of the founder of Crownover Coaches—suspected that Abner III’s quirks were symptomatic of something far more serious: a paralyzing fear of the unfamiliar and unpredictable that threw him into a panic whenever a decision had to be made that had no recent precedent. If the boy he sent to bring back his dinner reported that Hester’s had run out of the pot roast of beef—young Abner’s habitual order—he flew into a hysterical rage and could accomplish nothing the rest of the day. When in 1900 a fire broke out in the warehouse in Toledo and arrangements had to be made to ship in a fresh supply of door hinges from some other source, he locked himself in his office, emerging only after an employee shouted through the door that the situation was in hand. Finally, a request for compassionate leave by his secretary to attend his father’s funeral in California reduced the president of Crownover to a blubbering wreck, whereupon Abner II was forced to step in and assume his son’s responsibilities in addition to his own until Edward, his youngest, was indoctrinated to take over permanently. Announcement was made to the press that Abner III had been transferred to the newly created position of executive director, whose duties were still being decided upon. In his new office on the floor below his father’s, he read newspapers, circling those items connected with carriage making for Abner II’s review, posed for a full-length portrait to be painted by Howard Pyle, and countersigned contracts and requisition forms previously authorized by Edward.

This latest Abner in the distinguished line was the best-looking Crownover. He exhibited neither his two brothers’ inclination toward stoutness nor the simian likeness of their father, the latter’s long upper lip being in his case compensated for by the thin patrician nose of the Hamptons. He had a high, intelligent brow topped by a boyish thatch of dark hair highlighted by red-gold strands, the alert Crownover eyes, and square shoulders, from which his body tapered down to a trim waist in the best Charles Dana Gibson tradition. These features, as much as his brilliant future as his father’s heir apparent, had made him the matrimonial catch of the 1898 season, when Lucy Kent snagged him with the not inconsiderable assistance of her father Lionel and Abner Crownover II. Lionel Kent had left Cornwall in 1869 to work the Cliff Mine in Eagle River, Michigan, as a foreman for the Pittsburgh and Boston Company, leaving when the copper played out to stake a claim on one of the richest deposits of iron ore in the Upper Peninsula. By the time of his daughter’s wedding, the Kent Mining Company owned a fleet of steamships carrying millions of tons of iron pellets down Lake Huron to the Detroit docks, to be smelted and turned into stoves by the city’s biggest industry. A merger between the great ironmonger and the nation’s leading provider of private transportation to the wealthy was international news, and photographs of the honeymooning couple riding down the boulevards of Paris and boarding a gondola in Venice appeared in the rotogravure sections of newspapers from Berlin to Billings.

After six weeks abroad, the newlyweds returned to take up residence in a twenty-thousand-dollar Tudor mansion facing Lake St. Clair, a joint wedding present from their parents, where from their windows they could watch the hog-nosed Kent ore carriers laboring their way south beneath their awesome burdens. An interview with Lucy Kent Crownover and photographic spread showing off the custom-built Singer treadle-operated machine in the sewing room and fifteenth-century refectory table in the dining salon ran in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
in February 1899. By the time it was published, the couple had been cohabiting for six months, more than long enough for Lucy to become convinced that her husband was mentally ill.

He was not violent, nor even hostile. His manner toward his wife was gentle and caring, and his respect for her opinions regarding the operation of their household bordered upon serious dependency; the man simply could not make a decision, no matter how trivial. Being of a somewhat forceful disposition herself—her father used the term
headstrong
and considered himself fortunate to have matched her with someone who was not put off by such a disagreeable trait in a helpmeet—she was pleased to accept full responsibility for the choice of wallpaper in the parlor and the dishes that appeared on the massive dining table from day to day, with the assurance that her instructions would not be contradicted, so long as they did not contradict themselves. (Mashed potatoes, she had been informed quite clearly, must not be served on Sunday, once rice had made its debut their first meal at home after church.) Nor did it alarm her when Abner sharply upbraided his valet for laying out Thursday’s collar on Monday, or nearly allowing Wednesday’s black suit to go to the cleaners Tuesday night. Variety, after all, was a woman’s pleasure, and served only to upset the smooth gray sameness of the masculine world, in which the mere appearance of a facetious straw boater on the head of the American president instead of a good solid black derby sent the stock market plummeting. No such explanation could be brought to bear on Abner’s habit of twisting and untwisting the latch to the front door twenty-three times each night before retiring, or the even more complicated business involving the wall switch in their bedroom, which had to be pressed in multiples of seven times, finishing with the light off. These maneuvers were emblematic of his day, a tissue of repetitive mathematical therapeutic exercises that were at first annoying and perplexing, then alarming, and finally unbearable. By the time they observed their first anniversary, the Young Court (as one historically minded and slightly cynical senior executive had christened the new Mr. and Mrs. Crownover) was sleeping in separate bedrooms and meeting only for meals, public appearances, and conjugal relations; however damp her ardor had become toward her mate, Lucy understood the expectations of both sides of the family, and the importance of producing an Abner IV. None, however, was forthcoming. At the end of four years, Lucy had concluded that her husband, in addition to being mad, was sterile. This was evidence, perhaps, that there was order in the universe, and a God who possessed the common sense not to repeat a mistake.

She felt no rancor toward Abner, a gentle man when not faced with the anxiety of a choice to be made or a change in the routine. She felt, in fact, a certain tenderness toward him, made poignant by the knowledge that so prominent a firstborn was barred from seeking the same help as an equally disturbed commoner. Word that Abner Crownover’s son was damaged in some fundamental way must inevitably threaten the company’s fortunes; and so, in the daily family intercourse, the damage did not exist. He was ill through no fault of his own, and through no fault of his own he had no hope of a cure. Lucy’s experience in charity work for the poor had not prepared her for the realization that the wealthy could be as badly treated as they, without the balm of an organized sisterhood to turn to in their despair. Where was the Ladies’ Christian Society for the Relief of the Privileged? She pitied her husband as intensely as she despised the symptoms of his affliction.

To distract herself she filled her days with good works. In addition to planning fund-raising events for the Orphans’ Asylum with her mother-in-law (a withdrawn, eerily calm woman in whose presence she found it impossible to feel at ease), she attended meetings of the Order of the Eastern Star, her membership having been assured when Abner III was inducted into the Freemasons under his father’s sponsorship, helped choose decorations and arrange an orchestra for the annual Shipmaster’s Ball, where as a debutante she had first made the acquaintance of her future husband, and chaired the Junior League committee that collected old clothes for mending and shipment to the families of patriots slain in or impoverished by the fighting in Cuba and the Philippines. This last duty kept her away from home Friday nights; and Abner, after recovering from his tantrum over this betrayal, had taken to dining with his parents in the Queen Anne on Jefferson every Friday. Harlan, who was aware of this, and who as the middle son had been familiar with young Abner’s peculiarities longer than anyone else, was no more surprised when his knock at the parental front door was answered by his brother than he would have been by evidence of the steady rotation of the earth.

They shook hands warmly. Harlan liked Ab, despite his shortcomings. Or perhaps because of them; intentional or not, they represented a kind of rebellion against what was expected of their generation of Crownovers, and he celebrated them as he never could Edward’s lockstep loyalty to their father’s credo. Ab, however, was shy in his brother’s presence. Harlan didn’t know whether it was because he envied Harlan’s relative independence or—what was more likely—pitied him because he had been passed over in favor of the youngest brother when the time came to replace the eldest at the company helm. His smile of welcome was tentative and he met Harlan’s gaze only intermittently.

“Is he at home?” The question, Harlan realized, was unnecessary. Except in times of business emergency or when he felt absolutely compelled to make an appearance at one of the city’s centers of evening entertainment, Abner II could always be found at home after working hours. In his way he was as much a slave to his rails as was his namesake.

“He’s in his office. Would you like to see Mother?”

“Before I leave.”

Ab, whatever his problems, was not a fool, and could tell when his brother was upset. He said nothing more.

Abner II never referred to his private place at home as his study. It was an office, interchangeable in his mind with the room where he worked at the plant. Apart from a small Victorian fireplace with an arched iron surround and the absence of Abner I’s photographic portrait, it was at first glance identical to the office farther down the avenue: The plain desk and yellow-oak captain’s chair behind it might have shared the same workshop with their twins at the plant, the milk-white bowl fixture suspended by chains from the ceiling—scrupulously dusted and cleared of dead flies—shed the same frank light as the one at work, and even the blue unfigured wallpaper above the wainscoting looked as if it had been cut from the same bolt. The books in the built-in shelves were different. The volumes at the plant, where he received formal visitors, had been selected for display, and represented the preferred works by Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, the two Johnsons, Emerson, and Horace Lorimer, whose
Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
attracted notice only when it failed to appear on a businessman’s shelves. Here in the private sanctum reposed Abner’s choice collection of books devoted to engineering and design, from the earliest known publication of da Vinci’s notebooks to a six-volume set bound in green leather of technical books devoted to the inventions of Thomas Edison. In truth, Abner II would have sneered to hear his private library referred to as a “collection,” although he had spent enough to acquire some of the items at auction to attract the attention of most of the collectors’ journals, whose requests to interview him had all been refused. With one exception, the books were thumb-blurred and tattered from heavy use and were plainly not intended for either decoration or pleasure, but to serve as tools related to the manufacturing trade. The only truly pristine work was the green volume entitled
The Electric Car,
detailing Edison’s experiments with alternative transportation. Clearly it had come as part of the set, and had just as clearly been ignored by its owner. Its continuing presence on the shelf had more to do with Abner’s love of closure than any reverence for literature; he could not abide owning anything incomplete.

When Harlan opened the door at his father’s invitation, Abner looked up from the ledger he had been reading, a broad, flat, buckram-bound book as large as a plat map, spread out and propped between his thighs and the edge of the desk. The old man still had no need for reading glasses, and his bright pupils shifted their focus from the closely written figures in the columns to his son’s silhouette in the doorway without apparent delay. The mummified-monkey features registered no change in expression.