The Last Days of Night(104)

“Pardon?”

“You want to make a deal? Let’s make a deal. But first you should hear my offer.”

“You’re still negotiating?”

“Yes,” said Paul. “The moment you stop is the moment you’re never given another thing.”

Batchelor sat again.

“We’ll keep this all a secret,” offered Paul. “What my side has done. What your side has done. You have mud to fling at Westinghouse? I have mud to fling at Edison. I know about his connection to Harold Brown. I trust you’re not eager for him to make another appearance.”

Batchelor shook his head ruefully. “I told Thomas—told him a hundred times—not to do business with that man. This was always Thomas’s problem, I suppose. Poor management.”

“Brown’s off hiding from the mess he created?”

“Banished would be a better way of putting it. He’s far from New York, and we’ve made it very clear that his appearance within a thousand miles of here would not be healthy for him.”

“I’ll happily do you the service of not finding him. You want Fessenden to join Edison in New Jersey? I’ll see that it’s done. Westinghouse wants him jailed, but I’ll find some pretense to let him loose. You want to stay on at GE? Easy. But in exchange, there is one more thing I’ll need you to do for me.”

Batchelor waited expectantly.

There were many grand prizes Paul might demand for keeping his fetid secrets. And yet the only thing he really wanted would be inconceivably small to Batchelor.

“We’re all going to burn,” said Paul, “and we all deserve to. You. Me. Edison. Westinghouse. Brown. But together we might have a chance of seeing that one good thing comes of this unholy mess.”

“Oh?”

“There is one person who we can assure is granted the justice that we’ve so thoroughly deprived each other.”

“And who, Mr. Cravath, is that?”





Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

—STEVE JOBS



AGNES WASN’T AT home when Paul presented himself on her doorstep the following afternoon. He rang the bell a dozen times, but there was no response. Not even the maid came to answer the door. Number 4 was the stillest house along Gramercy.

Paul next went to the Metropolitan Opera House. The house manager was awkward. Miss Huntington was not in attendance. Paul asked when she might arrive.

“She won’t.”

Miss Huntington had given the Metropolitan board just a few days’ notice, he explained. She’d said that the city no longer suited her. She’d left no sign of where she might be headed.

This information was repeated by everyone of whom he inquired over the following days. No one had seen Agnes. Her house was being put up for sale. Even Stanford White told Paul, by way of letter, that he’d heard the news of Agnes’s sudden departure, but hadn’t any idea where she’d replanted her flag. Though if Paul did find her, would he please bring her back?

Three sleepless nights later, Paul read in the society pages a most curious item: The chanteuse Agnes Huntington’s engagement to Henry La Barre Jayne had been called off. DID HE JILT “PAUL JONES”? read the titillating headline in The Washington Post, referring to Agnes by her most famous role. Paul’s further inquiries confirmed that the Jayne clan had departed en masse for Philadelphia. This was a blow for their beloved son, but it was survivable.

It seemed that Agnes had simultaneously turned her back on both the city of her dreams and the safe perch of a marriage into wealth and stature. What she had once craved she had apparently renounced. And now she was somewhere else, searching for something else.

It didn’t take Paul long to figure out where she’d gone.

—

The Chicago Railway didn’t even stop in Kalamazoo, but the Michigan Central did, after a transfer in Toledo. Kalamazoo wasn’t a place someone went to be noticed; it was a place someone went to escape.

Paul arrived on a bright winter day. His hired carriage took him to a two-story wooden house at the center of the snowy town. It hadn’t been hard to find the address. Property was not bought and sold too frequently, so just a few conversations with locals gave him the information he needed.

Fannie was at the door when he arrived at the brown-slatted house. She clearly wasn’t happy to see Paul ascending the steps of her new home. But she allowed him a cup of tea and the few minutes he required to deliver some news. As for the request that accompanied his explanation, she admitted it wasn’t hers to grant.

When Agnes came downstairs, she gave little reaction at the sight of Paul.

“What stubborn need for abuse brought you here?”

“Now, now,” interrupted Fannie. “He’s not quite as foolish as I used to think.”

And with that, Fannie took her leave.

Agnes leaned against the kitchen cabinets, wrapping her orange cotton dress tightly around herself.

“This is the most chipper I’ve seen my mother since we left New York.”

“I read about you and Henry Jayne.”

“Did you travel here to file a report for the society page?”

“Miss Huntington,” said Paul, “I’ve spent most of the time since I met you making a lot of pretty terrible decisions, and I’d like to make a good one for a change. So here it is: I’ve come here to tell you that I’m in love with you.”