Читать книгу Kings Row - Henry Bellamann - Страница 7

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Union Street was the town’s principal business street. It ran north and south and passed the imposing west front of the courthouse, which occupied the center square of the town. Federal Street, next in importance, ran east and west and lay on the north side of the square. West of Union was Walnut Street; east of it was Cedar. On these four streets, within a few blocks of the courthouse square, was the best residence section of the town.

At the northern end of Union Street stood Thurston St. George’s red brick house. Thurston St. George was very old and very rich. He owned innumerable tracts of land and was greatly respected. The St. George house was the largest in town.

At the western extremity of Federal Street Aberdeen College lifted its pillared portico and looked straight across the town to the insane asylum whose white galleries and many-windowed façades gleamed through the trees three quarters of a mile away.

These were social boundaries. Every step away from these clearly marked precincts took one a step downward in the well-defined and perfectly understood social order of Kings Row.

Wealth and occupation were the determining factors. Lawyers, doctors, bankers, landowners, and the more important merchants made up the first families. To be sure, even this restricted category was crossed by lines of religious denominations. The Presbyterian was the “high-toned” church. The Campbellite ranked second, though a good many newcomers had somehow become enrolled there. The Baptist and Methodist graded equally, but certainly much lower than the first two.

Of course there was the Catholic church, but that didn’t figure in any way. The little German church didn’t either, though children of good families went to its pastor for music lessons.

There were some people who wondered just what was excluded from social groups by the rigidly kept conventions. There wasn’t really any kind of formal social activity. Sunday drives and evening visits were about all anyone did. Wedding invitations overflowed the lines, and funerals were free to all. But somehow the tall narrow-windowed houses of the elite kept a fiction of exclusiveness and maintained a sort of prestige. All of this was the sole concern of womenfolk. The men of the town met democratically.

The very heart of the inmost circle was represented by the family of Thurston St. George. They were Virginians and maintained a comfortable formality in their mode of life. “Old Thurston,” as everyone called him, was a massively built man, bearded as a patriarch and with a fine, mild face. Every day that weather permitted he rode about his scattered farms on a fat white horse. A small Negro boy always rode behind him and in the summer carried a huge cotton umbrella to shelter his master. At each gate the old man took the umbrella and the boy dismounted to open the gate and close it again. The pickaninny also took down a panel of rail fence and laid it up again as they went from field to field. Such a tour of inspection, always conducted at a majestic pace, took the whole of one day. The next day they visited another farm.

Thurston had a brother, Macmillan St. George. A tactful silence prevailed in society concerning Macmillan and his affairs.

Thurston was always well dressed. In winter he wore black broadcloth cut to a fashion at least forty years old. In summer he wore shiny alpaca. But Macmillan dressed like a farmer. He wore blue hickory shirts and high boots. Twenty years earlier he had built a handsome brick house on Federal Street, where he lived alone with a mulatto housekeeper named Fanny. Fanny had one daughter, a strikingly pretty quadroon child of twelve who was the image of Thurston’s granddaughter Hester. The girl was named Melissa and was enrolled in the colored school as Melissa St. George. Every afternoon she sat on the front porch with Macmillan, studying her lessons. Sometimes he took her books and heard her spelling, or listened as she stumbled through the pages of her fourth reader. If any of Macmillan’s friends stopped in for a chat, she quietly gathered her books together and went into the house. She was as neat and well dressed as any white child in the town.

For a time it had required the full strength of the Thurston St. George respectability to withstand this assault on propriety. But the utter imperturbability of Macmillan St. George and his really formidable wealth eventually silenced all whispering. Nowadays no one mentioned the matter at all. Macmillan never visited at the home of Thurston—or anywhere else, for that matter—and none of the women of Thurston’s family were ever seen to enter Macmillan’s door.

The St. Georges, with the Sansomes, the Curleys, the Gordons, and the Skeffingtons made up a strong and influential social stronghold. They were sometimes referred to irreverently by lesser people as the “Big Five.”

Young Hart Sansome was the mayor. Lucius Curley was president of the Burton County Bank, and Dr. Gordon was the town’s leading physician.

Colonel Isaac Skeffington was a lawyer—“the best defense lawyer in the state.” Everyone knew Ike Skeffington, most people liked him, and a good many were genuinely afraid of his caustic tongue.

“Colonel” was probably a courtesy title. No one remembered how he came by it, and no one ever asked. He was a tall, gaunt man with a fiery red beard that spread its splendors to his lowest vest button. He wore a frock coat the year around and, save in the hottest weather, a tall silk hat. He carried a heavy gold-headed cane and walked with a slight limp. No one ever saw him out of the courtroom without a cigar. He smoked a special brand, made for him at Packer’s Tobacco Factory from tobacco grown in the county. A dark smoke-stained spot marked the location of his mouth. Miles Jackson, the editor of The Gazette, said that wasn’t due to smoke but to the Colonel’s brimstone vocabulary, which had singed his whiskers brown. Jackson and Skeffington were close friends. It was probable that these two men knew more about the life of Kings Row and the people in it than anyone else.

The Colonel had built his house with the back toward Federal Street. He said he didn’t want all of the damned riffraff of the town walking by in the afternoon looking at him when he took off his shoes and sat with his feet on the porch railing. People said: “Just like Colonel Ike—does everything wrong end to. He’ll die standing up and be buried upside down, like as not.”

Skeffington walked through his vegetable garden one morning, and came out on the sidewalk. He stopped and took off his tall hat with a near flourish.

“Good morning, Marie, good morning, ma’am. How are you this fine morning?”

A basket phaeton, its cream-colored fringes swaying to the jog trot of a small plump horse, came to a halt. Madame von Eln greeted the Colonel cordially. He gave Parris’ leg a vigorous pinch.

“How are you, sonny?”

Parris disliked being called “sonny,” but he smiled. Colonel Skeffington, he knew, was one of his grandmother’s cherished friends.

“Very well, sir, thank you, Colonel Skeffington.”

“Fine boy you’re raising, Marie. He’s got manners. What are you going to make out of him?”

“Well, he wants to be a doctor.”

“Doctor? Doctor, hey! What for, my boy?”

“I think I’d like it—sir.”

“Nonsense. Working around with stinking pills and stuff. Have to get up in the middle of the night and go out to Godforsaken places because some old fool’s got a bellyache.”

Madame laughed aloud. “It’s a good profession, Isaac.”

“Stuff! Make him a lawyer. He ought to be a smart one. You’re smart, his daddy was smart, and his granddaddy Mitchell was smart.”

“Well, we’ll see. Will you ride downtown with us? Plenty of room.”

“Thank you, ma’am, I’m going the other way.”

The old lawyer walked slowly up Walnut Street. His great beard flashed and sparkled in the sun, and the clouds of smoke from his cigar gave him the appearance of a walking conflagration.

In the middle of the next block he squinted narrowly at a dingy house set in the midst of tangled shrubbery and swarming vines. The place was neglected and in bad repair. The narrow porch roof sagged like the back of an old work horse, and the floors of the side galleries were greenish with moss and damp.

A girl with copper-colored curls was standing at the decrepit gate. The Colonel bowed gravely. “Good morning, sissy.”

She looked at him without smiling. After a moment’s hesitation she replied, “My name is Cassandra.”

“Oh, ho! Is that so? You are Dr. Tower’s little girl?”

“Yes. Yes—sir.” She spoke with a certain reluctance, and Colonel Skeffington’s small brown eyes twinkled. “And how is the good Dr. Tower today?”

She eyed him with open suspicion. “Very well, sir.”

“That’s good. Fine crop of curly hair you’ve got, miss, fine color—like mine.” He removed his hat and shook his long straight locks. “Redheads have got spunk and character. Don’t you ever forget it. Fine people—redheads.”

She smiled a little—a wan, uncertain smile that flickered quickly away.

He bowed again, with an exaggerated politeness, and clicked his cane briskly on the soft brick walk.

“Likely-looking gal,” he said to himself.

Dr. Tower came out on the front porch as Colonel Skeffington walked away.

“Cassandra!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come in the house.”

“Yes, sir.”

The child hurried back to the house. Her father stood waiting until she came in, then closed the door.