Leaving Lucy Pear(67)

Caleb leaned across the desk. “You will end this strike or I’ll destroy your campaign.”

“Would you really do that, sir?”

“I don’t give a damn about you becoming mayor.”

“Of course you do,” Josiah said, in awe of his own steadiness, a warm courage through his throat, the worm held at bay. “It’s your campaign. And it looks like you might lose anyway. People are a little fired up, if you haven’t noticed. Sacco and Vanzetti. Beatrice Cohn. The tide is turning. Fiumara’s looking like a beleaguered butterfly right about now.”

Caleb breathed like a bull.

“I’m doing my best, you know. Trying to play up my working-class roots. Reverting to the accent you taught me how to lose. Did you let the scabs in, sir?”

“It’s nearly one! Let them in to go down and come back up? I got a call from Babcock. He got covered trucks to bring men in from New Hampshire. His stone is moving! He wanted me to know mine wasn’t. Do you have any idea how much you’re costing us? Of course you don’t, you have no idea about how anything is actually done, you just shake the hands, make the deals.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted me to do.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “After everything I’ve done for you. Your speeches, your car. It’s all mine.” His lips drew back, baring his teeth. “If you had a daughter, you would understand. You wouldn’t screw with me. If you had any children at all.”

“That’s very cruel, sir.”

“It’s not half of what I’ll do to you. You’ll be out of a job! Mark my words.”

“But who will take my place? One of your sons?”

Caleb sat then, on the chaise against the wall, which was so low, and his descent so abrupt, that once he was down, he appeared helpless. He didn’t look at Josiah—he looked at the wall behind Josiah, where a portrait hung of Caleb Fiske Stanton, Caleb’s grandfather. Caleb was thinking, Josiah supposed, of his family’s greatness, and of their imminent ruin at the hands of Josiah Story. Exaggerations both. Why should Josiah feel such pity for him? Not the glinting slash of pity he’d felt in odd moments before, when Caleb was in front of him, telling him to do something. That pity was for Caleb’s not being able to tell whether Josiah obeyed out of respect or duty; that was for how vulnerable Caleb’s power made him. That pity quickly evaporated because Josiah wanted power, too. But in this moment, having disappointed Caleb in the worst ways possible, Josiah was free of obligation and could see the man’s tired sorrow.

“If they strike tomorrow, you’ll bring in the scabs.”

Josiah didn’t even nod. He pretended at nothing, only sat with his hands in his lap, his chest open to whatever Caleb would say next. The man in the pit was within him now. The chant was clear. Justice. That was all.

“So you think those wops are innocent,” Caleb said.

“I have no idea,” Josiah said.

“You read Thayer’s decision? Fuller’s report? You think a man like Lowell, a Harvard president, would lie?”

“I think all sorts of men lie. I think maybe that’s the whole point, sir.”

Caleb was silent. He looked toward the pit, where nothing moved but the bird, and two more that had joined it at the puddle. The birds hopped, flew off briefly, and returned, pecked at each other’s wings. Josiah watched Caleb watch them, his fingers propping up his chin, his face slowly softening, like clay. His silence stretched on for so long Josiah started to worry he’d had a stroke. Then Caleb looked up.

“Our poor Susannah,” he said. “She’s had enough.”

Josiah waited, unsure what his father-in-law meant. But Caleb only looked at him, his face soft, and expectant, and because what he’d said was true, Josiah nodded. He nodded and nodded, until Caleb got up and left.





Twenty-eight




The men were executed, their heads encased in Robert G. Elliott’s ingenious leather helmets, their stomachs full. There was some picketing outside the State House—the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a few others would appeal their ten-dollar fines—but mostly the people were tired, the crowds small. All the insurance the city had bought against riots and bombings, the mobs of state troopers armed with rifles and tear bombs, the former was regretted, the latter sent home. In Paris, thousands of people marched in the streets shouting, “Death to Fuller!” They smashed the windows of restaurants serving American diners, mauled billboards advertising American artists, hurled stones and seltzer siphons at police—the papers called it the worst violence Paris had seen since the war. In Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Havana, Sydney, Mexico City, Geneva, London, workers marched, their heads bared; U.S. embassies were bombed; boycotts were called against American goods. The Giornale d’Italia declared: “Democratic and liberal in theory, the United States desired to show that in practice it does not admit other laws than its own, not even the law of humanity.” But Boston, the morning after, nearly echoed with silence. In Gloucester, quarrymen returned to the quarries, dockworkers to their docks, and by late afternoon the Heschel brothers, Ira Hirsch and Henry Haven, sat in lumpy, intricately carved armchairs built for the Bents a century before, their eyes traveling between the papers and Bea, who lay in her usual spot on the sofa, her arms heavy across her face.