Читать книгу Wickford Point - John P. Marquand - Страница 12

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Samuel Seabrooke had received the farm at Wickford Point in part payment of a debt, and when he moved there with his family the general outlines of the place and most of the buildings must have been established. The main farmhouse was close to the Wickford River. It had been built in the late seventeen hundreds by one of the Macey family in Boston as a hunting lodge. The front of the house was square and handsome, painted an even white. Toward the rear a subsequent owner had added to the summer kitchen ell on different levels, so that in moving from one room to another you walked up and down steps through narrow passageways. A later owner had built a cattle barn not far from the house, and also two hay barns nearer the river. These were used to store salt hay, which once was brought from the marshes near the coast on flat scows. Beyond the buildings was a strip of pine and birch wood, and there was a cattle lane just behind the trees, which led past the south hay barn through the south orchard to the upper pastures. The entire holding was not more than a hundred acres and the farm was never, in its best days, first-rate land either for grazing or for tillage, but the situation on the point where the tidal river flowed, the formal garden, which had been planned at the same time as the house, and the old elms and oaks upon the lawn, made it picturesque. A number of visitors have commented upon the trees and the garden, including Bronson Alcott, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, at the time when he was working in the Salem Customs, and, of course, John Brill. Their references to the place may be found among the pages of various brown cloth-bound books published by Ticknor and Fields in the sixties. Even Cousin Clothilde could quote a number of them, entirely from hearsay because she seldom read a book.

"Bowery, wind-embraced Wickford Point."

"The lilac-bedecked Elysium, where the Seabrooke nymphs weave garlands."

"The white-walled Acropolis of Wickford Point, where there is good tea and better talk."

"When the sunset gilds the roses of Wickford Point."

"Wickford Point has always been, and may it always be, the home of noble thoughts and gentle laughter."

The place had a way of growing on one. Even when I was a small child my thoughts dwelt a great deal on Wickford Point, although we did not live there much. It was a definite solace to me even then to feel that I was somehow connected with an estate that was a little finer than anyone else's, more beautiful, less vulgar.

When I was eight years old this interest in Wickford Point caused me to learn something about it from my grandfather. We were living, that summer, outside of New York on a beach near Sandy Hook, and my grandfather customarily took the morning boat, a white boat with paddle wheels and a walking beam, to his office on Pine Street in New York. One morning very early my mother got out my blue sailor suit which buttoned sideways like a real sailor's.

"What do you think?" she said. "Your grandfather wants you to go with him to his office in New York to spend the day."

I did not say what I actually thought, which was that the prospect seemed formidable, because I knew that it would not have helped. After breakfast my grandfather led me down to the wharf. In spite of the warm weather he was dressed for business in a silk hat and a Prince Albert coat. We sat in his stateroom and drank lemonade, and looked out the window at the tugs and at the sails of the pilot boats. When other men in tall hats and Prince Alberts came in to see my grandfather he told them that I was his grandson and they made complimentary remarks.

I accepted the city as one accepts everything at the age of eight. I still remember the clatter of the carts on the cobblestones; I still remember the men working in cages at the office, and I remember the stir occasioned when my grandfather walked past. He took me into his own room and sat down at his roll-top desk.

"Would you like to cut some coupons?" he asked me. "George will help you."

George must have been a clerk. He brought some bonds and a pair of scissors and did most of the work himself.

"So you're going to be a banker too, Jimmy?" he inquired.

"No," I told him. "I'm going to be a farmer and live on Wickford Point." My grandfather heard me and turned his swivel chair.

"That's enough of that nonsense," he said. "Wickford Point isn't a farm—it's a white elephant. It eats up money faster than I can make it. You get those ideas out of your head, Jim. They were all going barefoot when I came to Wickford Point. You like to wear shoes, don't you? And don't tell me you want to be a poet. Do you want to be a poet and grow a beard and look for huckleberries? You're going to learn something about money if I can arrange it. Somebody's got to know about money besides me, and I'm not going to leave you much either. I can't support the whole damn family."

It was not a new idea to me that my grandfather supported the family. Frequently in the evening when the market had gone sour, he remarked that he was supporting the whole damn family, all his nieces and nephews, all his cousins, everybody. There was not one of them, he stated on such evenings, that was capable of raising a finger. I don't know why he should have thought that I was capable, but I believe he did. I had heard all this before, but I had never realized that there was anyone in the world who did not approve highly of Wickford Point.

"You can go to college," he said, "but you've got to do something afterward. I support the whole damn family, and they don't even know I'm supporting them. By God, they take it for granted that I should support them. Your grandmother was a beauty. I remember the first day I came to Wickford Point."

"What were they doing?" I asked.

"They were sitting under an apple tree," my grandfather said, "playing 'Quotations.' Clethra was painting a picture and they asked me to stay to supper and then they found there wasn't any supper. I took Clethra downtown in the carryall and bought some. That was forty years ago. I've been buying everybody's supper ever since, the whole damn family's supper. I'd be worth two million dollars now if I hadn't stopped that day at Wickford Point. When I die I'll still be paying for that supper, if there's any money left."

My grandfather smiled suddenly and I realized that he was not being unkind.

"They were amazing," he said. "Common sense was just left out of them. Clethra never understood where money came from, but she was worth it. She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." He paused because a clerk had come in from the outer office.

"Mrs. Brill is here, sir," he said.

It was my cousin Clothilde with billowing white sleeves and long white gloves. She kissed my grandfather and she kissed me too.

"Uncle Jim," she said, "I've just been to the bank. There must be some mistake somewhere. They say I've overdrawn my account."

"What the devil, Clothilde?" my grandfather said. "You had your check the first of the month."

"I know," said Cousin Clothilde. "There must be some mistake somewhere. I wish you'd speak to them at the bank, Uncle Jim. They shouldn't be careless."

"Where's Hugh?" my grandfather said. "Why can't Hugh look out for you?"

"Hugh is down at the boat races in New London," Cousin Clothilde said. "He wanted me to go, but I never know what they do at those Harvard races except drink with each other. I came down here instead to do some shopping, and when I stepped over to the bank to draw enough money for my ticket back to Boston, they told me that there was no money. Uncle Jim, I really wish you'd go to the bank and speak to them."

My grandfather opened his office door. "George," he said, "make out a check of three hundred dollars for Mrs. Brill."

Cousin Clothilde sighed.

"You're always so sweet," she said. "You're the only one who looks out for me. I have to have someone to look out for me. Jim will look out for me when he grows up, won't you, Jimmy?"

"Yes," I said, and Cousin Clothilde smiled.

"There's a pony and a new carriage at Wickford Point," she said. "Your cousin Hugh bought them, and I'm going to have you come up to play with Sidney and Harry next week. You'll be up soon, won't you, Uncle Jim? You're the only one who can manage Aunt Sarah."

"Now run along," said my grandfather, "and buy yourself some dresses, and don't let me see Hugh if you can help it. God knows why you married him when you had a dozen other chances. Is old Brill still around?"

"Yes," said Cousin Clothilde. "He's such a darling. He's so beautiful with his long, white beard. He was asking for you last week. He wants to see you, Uncle Jim."

"Does he?" said my grandfather. "Well, I know why. It's near the end of the month."

"He's a darling," Cousin Clothilde said again. "He rowed across the river last week. He brought me some white gentians. He's written a new poem about the river."

"Did he have on shoes?" my grandfather asked.

"Yes," said Cousin Clothilde, "of course he did. He's a darling."

"He's a humbug," my grandfather said, "and he isn't reliable."

Although the word "humbug" was new to me, it was obviously a term of derision. An inherited sense of fitness told me that it was an improper description of a great man. I remembered how old John Brill had placed his hand upon my head when I had been led to meet him. There had been a malodorous aura about his clothes, of apples, wood smoke, pine shavings and chewing tobacco.

"Another little pilgrim," he had said. "Intimations of immortality—you can see it in his eyes. Yes, Sarah my dear, I could manage with another cup of tea and two more buns."

My grandfather smiled again, and again I realized that he was not being unkind.

It was always hard to think of my forebears as people with thoughts and desires like my own. Even the pictures in the family albums—and there were a number of those albums, fastened with heavy brass catches, placed upon the third shelf of the whatnot in the small parlor at Wickford Point—even those pictures were unreal. The subjects sat in constricted positions, staring at nothing with cold grimaces that did not indicate either ease or pleasure. Some of the likenesses were tintypes and others were the faded brown of my father's well-colored meerschaum pipe.

My father and my cousin Hugh used to smoke those pipes very carefully in the harness room in the barn; Aunt Sarah, who had been sensitive about her mother's smoking, disliked the odor of tobacco in the house. My grandfather was the only one who was allowed to smoke without protest. He smoked three cigars a day from a private stock which had been given him by Mr. Vanderbilt in New York, and after each cigar Aunt Sarah opened all the windows and dusted off the curtains.

"He smokes," Aunt Sarah told me once, "because he went to sea."

To her mind allowances had to be made for anyone who went to sea, and she seemed familiar with the human weaknesses which were developed in that profession. The sea seems far enough away in these days, but to Aunt Sarah the ships were still coming in. She was living as she had as a young girl, through the days of the Gold Rush and the China trade. Every vice was understandable to her if a man had been to sea,—gambling, foul language, liquor and tobacco,—yet she was broad-minded enough to admit that the sea was necessary to a proper and self-respecting life.

She made this remark about my grandfather on a number of occasions and it always surprised me because he was in no sense a seafaring man, although he had sailed for China as a cabin boy at the age of fourteen. On his return he must have realized that the great days of shipping were over, for he never took another voyage; instead he became an errand boy in downtown New York.

My grandfather appeared there in the years before the Civil War at just the time that Horatio Alger's characters began to make their way. He was a Yankee who must have rubbed shoulders with Tom the bootblack and Jerry the street boy. He was a figure of the wicked days—one of the ogres who now darken the pages of liberal economic primers—but he was the one who kept Wickford Point from vanishing, and he was the one who enabled all its archaic complications to live into the present. I have sometimes wondered whether, if he could return to it, he might not repent having left a trust fund for the upkeep of the place. Curiously enough Mr. Caldicott, our trustee, whom I had always considered unimaginative, said the same thing once when I saw him in Boston.

"Well, Mr. Caldicott," I told him, "if he could come back, he wouldn't know the old place now."

Sometimes, however, I am not so sure that he did not come back, and that all the people who have ever lived at Wickford Point are not somewhere near it.

These matters are of no importance except for the light which they may throw upon strange vanished days which no one living can understand. Nevertheless those days were at the root of all our difficulties. All those stiff-necked figures in the picture album, with their heads supported by invisible brackets—all their likes and dislikes—all the endless anecdotes about them which have died into a strange hushed silence—have given Wickford Point its quality. As one tries to piece them all together, the responsibility becomes enormous, for one is speculating about history and toying rudely with the springs of change. We can interpret, but we can never know. All that is certain—and this is as sure as fate—is that these vanished people made things what they are.