Unto the Sons (67 page)

His uncles were not very talkative, despite Joseph’s efforts to start a conversation; he hoped something they said would reveal who was Anthony and who Gregory. Joseph thought they were probably tired; they looked tired, and they rode on in silence. As the train slowed to a stop alongside a small wood-framed building with a sign bearing the familiar name “Ambler,” one of his uncles reached up for Joseph’s suitcase. The aisle of the car was crowded with people getting off, and as Joseph waited he leaned toward the window and watched a majestic black automobile, longer than any he had ever imagined, pulling in against the edge of the platform.

Following his uncles down the steps of the railcar, Joseph saw a very tall white-haired man stepping out of the rear door of the limousine that was held open by a uniformed driver. The man wore a black homburg and a black suit, and a gold chain dangled in front of his vest; but what Joseph noticed more, in addition to his impressive height, was that the gentleman was carrying in his hands a pair of men’s black shoes.

Joseph’s uncles stopped when they spotted the man, as if they were mindful about keeping their distance. They waited as he strode across the platform and then paused at a shoeshine shack where a small man wearing a heavy sweater over his apron accepted the shoes with a little bow.

“Who’s that?” Joseph asked his uncles, watching as the gentleman turned around and walked back toward the chauffeur, who again held open the door.

“That man owns this town, and everyone in it,” one of the uncles said. “That’s Dr. Mattison, and he lives like a king.”

“Well, he carried his own shoes to the shoemaker,” Joseph said, as the big car began to pull away. “In Italy, no rich man would be seen doing that. He would have a servant do it. This is really a different country.”

His uncles said nothing.

33.

D
r. Richard V. Mattison approached his seventieth year with the same sense of direction and drive that a half-century earlier had carried him from his father’s farm in rural Pennsylvania to the top of a multimilliondollar industry and the ownership of a private domain in Ambler that made him worthy of the nickname the American press had recently given him—“the Asbestos King.”

Although his firm still supplied drugstores around the country with the over-the-counter cures he had developed for headaches and rheumatism before the turn of the century, the six-foot-four-inch pharmacist and physician was now dispensing antidotes and precautionaries primarily for the betterment of buildings, utilities, and machines. Each week miles of his asbestos-treated adhesive tape and sheathing—fireproof, leakproof, erosion-resistant, fuel-saving—rolled off his Ambler assembly lines to be delivered nationwide and worldwide to industries that would wrap or fit the textile around the pipes, joints, and valves of its boiler rooms, reservoir chambers, and various other sources of supply and power. In the early postwar years there were few newly built factories, public buildings, or apartment houses in urban America that did not contain asbestos in some form within their structures—as insulation material within the walls, or as an incombustible agent within the floor tiles, or as the primary substance of the outer siding and roof shingles. During the war Dr. Mattison’s firm—along with such competitors as Johns-Manville—were especially active in fulfilling defense contracts placed by American military officials who requisitioned asbestos wrapping tape for steamships, asbestos brake pads and clutch facings for military vehicles, and asbestos strap linings to fit within soldiers’ steel helmets. As a patriot, Dr. Mattison was honored to fill the orders. As a capitalist, he was pleased with the profits.

Now he had branch offices in New York and Chicago, Boston and Buffalo, Detroit and Minneapolis, and a dozen other American cities; and he lived with his wife and a multitude of servants in a multiturreted castle on a hill fronted by more than seventy acres of lawn. The lawn was graced with sunken gardens, a pond with a tiny stone bridge and a gazebo, and several fountains bearing statues of mythological creatures
that spouted water out of assorted orifices whenever the doctor passed through the main gate in his high-roofed, asbestos-peppered gray Packard limousine. At least twice daily, as the doctor was driven to and from the fortresslike company headquarters a mile west of the castle, the female servants on the lawn would curtsy, the gardeners and other male laborers would doff their caps, and an armed guard at the gatehouse would salute with one hand while holding back a barking mastiff with the other.

The doctor’s chauffeur was a fastidious, rigid-spined Swede named John Frederickson, who, when driving, appeared from the road to be standing up. Nearly as tall as the doctor, though considerably less bulky, Frederickson wore spit-polished cavalry boots, white gloves, and usually a beige choke-collared uniform with a peaked cap of matching color; and he took almost perverse pride in never stopping his car during duty hours to go to the bathroom, even when driving his employer on long trips to such branch offices as the ones in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Providence—and he remained dutifully behind the wheel also while the car was parked at a station waiting to be refilled with gas. In warmer months, when Dr. Mattison was often in Europe on business, Frederickson would drive Mrs. Mattison and selected female servants to and from the Mattisons’ summer home in Newport, Rhode Island; the journey usually exceeded twelve hours, during which time the ladies frequently requested rest stops. After helping them out of the car, Frederickson would wait patiently behind the wheel. In the not too distant future, Frederickson would die prematurely of a pelvic disorder.

The maintenance of the doctor’s limousine and the other motor vehicles in his garage, the feeding of his horses, the oiling of his workmen’s wagon wheels, the upkeep of the lawns and gardens surrounding the castle, as well as the roads and the cattle, all were under the regulation of the doctor’s superintendent and chamberlain, an old Civil War veteran of the Union Army named William J. Devine. Craggy-featured and battlescarred, slight but sinewy, Devine confronted almost everyone with an attitude connoting either aloofness or abrasiveness. The one exception to this was the doctor, whom he both feared and adored. Devine had never requested a day off during his two decades of employment by Dr. Mattison. Nor did the doctor ever suggest that he take one.

Although he had authority over nearly one hundred workers on the castle grounds, in the castle itself, and on the rear grounds—the latter consisting of three hundred forty acres of farmland, forestland, a reservoir, and two lakes used for fishing, boating, and skating in winter—the employees’ assignments were so vastly spread, and thus mostly performed
beyond Devine’s purview, and so often subjected to last-minute changes fomented by the doctor’s countermands that in the resulting confusion the doctor himself sometimes ended up doing menial tasks—such as delivering his shoes to the cobbler’s shack near the rail terminal.

Also promoting confusion was the fact that a high percentage of Devine’s work force (a force favored by the doctor primarily because it represented cheap labor) consisted of Italians who could not understand English, but who convincingly pretended to Devine that they could. They reacted to all of his demands with amiable nods and other illusory manifestations of compliance that not a few of their ancestors had perfected to an art during centuries of subjugation to feudal and other foreign rulers in southern Italy. During the spring of 1919 Devine was given permission by the doctor to hire a university-educated Italian who was fluent in English to serve as a combination interpreter-paymaster; but this man soon ran off with the sack containing the employees’ weekly pay, and the doctor refused to replace him.

Dr. Mattison was never eager in his private life or his business life to take on extra intermediaries to function between himself and his hired help. He rarely kept more than four vice-presidents to help him direct his two-thousand-employee asbestos business in Ambler (two of the vice-presidents were his sons); and while he thought that having a superintendent like Devine around the castle was necessary, he believed that providing Devine with subalterns was not. Adding subalterns could turn the estate into a spawning ground for lower-management drones—or, just as bad, supply Devine with scapegoats whenever the doctor wished to point an accusing finger. And so as far as the estate was concerned, the doctor believed that Devine represented enough management; and even though Devine was
not
enough, he knew enough not to argue with the doctor.

Devine was dependent on Dr. Mattison not only for his job but also for the shelter and sustenance that Devine in turn shared with six members of his family, all living with him in a three-story, twelve-room, rent-free stone building located downhill behind the castle, nestled within thick shrubbery and surrounded by tall oak and maple trees that kept the house out of sight from the vantage point of the castle’s front lawn. In addition to Devine there was his crippled wife, Francine, a victim of a congenital bone disease that had worsened through the years; their thirty-five-year-old adopted daughter, Hannah; Hannah’s husband, Charles Hibschman, a quiet man who had once aspired to be a country schoolteacher but who now kept Devine’s books; and the couple’s three school-age sons
(one of whom would succeed Frederickson’s successor as the doctor’s driver).

Behind Devine’s house, and also obscured by abundant bushes and forestland, were smaller stone dwellings occupied by some of Devine’s factotums and their kinfolk. Among the innumerable duty assignments—many of which changed with the weather as well as the doctor’s impulses—were the upkeep of the boathouse and the two lakes (the larger one measuring six acres); the care and operation of the farm (on which were two thousand chickens, fifteen cows, eight riding horses, four plow horses, three pigs); and the filtering and conservation of water in the tank house, an eight-story structure whose four top floors were occupied by huge water drums that serviced the estate, and whose four lower floors were divided into apartments for workers and their dependents, on whom drops of water occasionally fell.

Devine’s underlings were also called upon seasonally to chalk the lines of the doctor’s lawn tennis court (he had a big serve, erratic ground strokes); prune and water the plants and flowers in the greenhouse; pack with hay in the icehouse each winter large frozen chunks of lake water for summertime use in the kitchen’s iceboxes; remove from the edges of the lawn’s roadway each autumn dozens of portable palm trees, potted in large containers on steel rollers, for sheltering until spring; perform as glaziers, plumbers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, or at other endeavors for which their jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none abilities might be put to use. If the doctor suspected they had free time, they might be temporarily shifted across town to work in one of the plant’s assembly lines, or to help the stonemasons and carpenters in the new housing project that was under way in 1921 to fulfill the housing needs of the increased number of asbestos workers the doctor’s growing business was expected to require by late 1922.

An architect named John Bothwell was brought in to work under Devine on the plans, and he set up his drawing board in a shed next to Devine’s house. One night, after Bothwell had left for the day, Dr. Mattison strolled over to inspect the sketches for the new residences; he borrowed a pencil from Devine and drew over each rooftop an adornment shaped exactly like a pawn from a chess set (the doctor excelled at the game). On the following morning, after Devine had shown Bothwell the doctor’s handiwork, the architect became enraged and threatened to quit. “It won’t make any difference to the doctor if you quit or not,” Devine told him, explaining that the doctor considered architects as replaceable as
grass cutters. Bothwell, who needed work, thought better of it; and when the stone row of houses began to go up the next year, each asbestos rooftop supported the knob of the pawn.

These houses were constructed along Church Street, just southwest of Trinity Episcopal Memorial Church, which the doctor had redesigned in 1891 after firing the Philadelphia architectural firm that had thought too highly of its original sketches and quarreled with him over his suggestions for change. Consecrated in 1901, the Gothic edifice had been dedicated in memory of the doctor’s only daughter, Esther Victoria Mattison, who had died suddenly in 1887 at the age of four, of typhoid fever. The mother of the child, the first Mrs. Mattison—Esther Dafter Mattison, whom the doctor had married in 1874—had died unexpectedly in 1919 at the summer home in Newport, where she had gone to escape an allergic ailment so acute that her only relief in Ambler had come when sitting, wearing a fur coat, in the icehouse. Nine months after her death the doctor married her close friend Mary Cottrell Seger, a divorcée from Princeton, New Jersey, who was ten years younger and considerably less dowdy. But shortly after the wedding, which was held in Trinity Memorial Church in April 1920, the second Mrs. Mattison was injured in an auto accident while being driven through Fairmount Park in Philadelphia with the doctor. Although Frederickson had seemed somewhat fidgety behind the wheel before the accident, as the doctor later told his older son, the doctor in no way held Frederickson responsible for the collision; another car, out of control, had rammed the limousine on the side where Mrs. Mattison had been sitting, and, while the doctor’s injuries healed, she was unconscious for three days and suffered broken bones that would immobilize her for nearly two years.

During this time she never left the castle, spending most of her days on the top floor in a wheelchair, surveying the world beyond the curved windows of the turrets through the high-powered binoculars that the doctor had brought back to her from a business trip in Germany. Through the lenses she could see faraway things with astonishing clarity, intimate and sometimes shocking things that at first she thought she had no business seeing—but later, becoming more accustomed to being
Mrs
. Mattison, she concluded that it
was
her business, that all within view fell under her concern as the proprietress of the castle, and as the marital partner of the man to whom all owed allegiance and respect.