The Last Days of Night(26)

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.

—CHARLES F. KETTERING, INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRICAL STARTER



ON A HUMID morning that August, Paul was startled by a rap on his office door. He looked up from his correspondence to see the stunned face of the firm’s secretary, Martha.

“You have a visitor,” she said. “Well, actually…two of them.”

The calling card she handed him contained a name familiar from the society pages.

“Agnes Huntington is in the waiting area?”

“Yes.”

“The real Agnes Huntington?”

“If a girl that lovely isn’t the real Agnes Huntington,” answered Martha, “then I can’t imagine what a light the original must be.”

Why was he being visited by one of the leading young singers of the New York stage?

Of course he knew all about her. He read the papers. She was American by birth, but she’d come to fame in London, selling out a run of Paul Jones at the Prince of Wales, where, in a brilliant spark of casting, she’d performed the male title role. The glowing notices she’d received for such a bravura comedic feat had traveled across the Atlantic. Agnes had followed them soon enough, singing for a long run in the Boston Ideals and then making a tour of the East Coast. The Metropolitan Opera had finally courted her away at what the papers suggested had been a considerable expense. The summer season was consumed with talk that she would reprise her famed role. Paul hadn’t seen it, of course. An evening’s box at the Met would likely cost him a month’s salary, if he was even able to purchase a ticket. Lawyers were day laborers to the truly rich. That attorneys labored with pens rather than shovels did not dignify their position in the eyes of Rockefellers and Morgans and Roosevelts. It only made their attempts at society life all the more quaint.

And yet Agnes Huntington, the brightest star to shine under the glow of Broadway’s footlights, was waiting patiently in Paul’s front room.

“You said there were two visitors?” inquired Paul. “Who is the other one?”

“Oh,” replied Martha. “It’s her mother.”

—

“Luminous” had been among the words the London papers had chosen to describe the twenty-four-year-old star. Paul might have gone even further in his choice of adjectives. Agnes’s curly ash-blond hair was perfectly done up in a halo around her face. Her skin was the same milky shade as her teeth. Her eyes were a winter gray, and they were impossible to read. Blue lace hung from the bottom of her green dress. The lace alone was likely more expensive than Paul’s entire suit. And yet as pristine as she appeared, her demeanor was not delicate. She was no porcelain doll. She was a distant glacier. Remote, quiet, and yet possessed of great and unknowable activity beneath the surface.

Paul found the effect unnerving. Luckily, her mother, Fannie, did enough talking for the three of them.

Yes, tea would be welcome. No, sugar would not. The matter that they had come to discuss was quite a delicate one. Paul’s discretion would be appreciated. They were in need of an attorney who could see to it that the present situation did not find its way to The Sun’s society page. Paul, Fannie Huntington had gathered, represented George Westinghouse against Thomas Edison. He had, perhaps, some experience with underdogs. He was unafraid of an unfair fight.

The mention of Thomas Edison reminded Paul of his professional capacity. “I can assure you,” he said, “that whoever it is who’s giving you trouble, he could not possibly be as powerful a foe as Thomas Edison.”

This was precisely what Fannie Huntington wanted to hear. Paul did not get the impression that she was a woman frequently disappointed. She was among the smallest women Paul had ever seen, but fit a double-sized personality into a squat bullet of a frame. She was a rifle shell. Hardened and cooled, packed and loaded, ever ready to explode. How this mother had bred this daughter was a question for Mr. Darwin.

The problem, Fannie explained, had begun in Boston, when Miss Agnes was singing with the Ideals. Was Paul aware of this group, she asked, and of Agnes’s previous position therein?

“Mr. Cravath is quite aware of who I am, Mother,” said Agnes more sharply than he would have imagined. Her speaking voice had a hard edge. It gave no indication of the marvel that had made her famous. “He knows that I sang with the Ideals. He knows that I’m singing at the Met now. I’d wager he’s likely been to a matinee.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t been so lucky.” Paul supposed this confession would lower him a peg in her estimation.

“Well, then we must invite you to a performance,” suggested Agnes graciously, without hint of condescension.

Paul had met but two strains of celebrity. The first laboriously upheld the pretense of being unaware of their own fame; they feigned humble surprise when you knew who they were. Golly! The second were experienced enough in their position not to bother. Agnes, having fit more than a few years of fame into her brief life, was of this latter type.

That she felt no need to prove anything to him, while he felt such desire to prove much to her, only accentuated the continent of social distance between them.

“So what is it that befell you in Boston?” he asked formally.

“Oh, it began in Boston,” answered Fannie. “But the difficulty occurred in Peoria.”