The Last Days of Night(46)
By the end of a week’s searching, Paul was no closer to finding the vanished genius. His labors had served only to further delay the healing of his hurt left leg. His boots were worn, and his shins pulsed with a dull ache.
He also exchanged brief letters with his second client. Or clients. His correspondence had been entirely with Fannie Huntington, not her daughter. Shortly after Paul’s release from Bellevue, Mr. Foster wrote to Fannie directly. As any blackmailer would, he cautioned her against involving lawyers in the matter before them. The more people who became involved, he said, the harder it would be for him to keep the details of this business quiet. He tried to depict Paul’s involvement as the Huntingtons’ biggest problem.
Paul assured Fannie by post that he was working on the situation. Privately, he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, but he knew he’d better think of something soon. It pained him to think of the precariousness of Agnes’s position, and of how little he’d done to help her.
Moreover, there remained the small matter of the billion-dollar patent suit. And the business of defending George Westinghouse’s right to manufacture electric lamps was not going well.
Paul’s countersuit against Edison was defeated in the U.S. circuit court in Pittsburgh. Judge Bradley ruled that Edison’s light bulb had been clearly differentiated from any of its predecessors. As such, Edison had not violated any of the patents that Westinghouse had purchased from Sawyer and Man. Edison’s patent remained inviolable. In Paul’s absence, his senior partners had appealed. No one had much hope that they would win.
He returned to the offices of Carter, Hughes & Cravath on a Monday as the sky threatened to loose the year’s first snow onto the city. As Paul took the steps up from the street and then mounted the iron staircase to the third floor, he felt a curious sensation. Returning to this familiar place felt both strangely comfortable and strangely foreign. He’d worked here for under a year. Yet it felt as if he’d been a child when he first hung his overcoat on this brass rack. He both could not imagine how young he’d been, and at the same time could not fathom ever feeling young again.
He found Carter and Hughes well into a meeting with a short man of serious demeanor. The attorneys and their guest appeared engrossed in a set of contracts. Paul gestured hello through the glass, but none of the three saw him. He returned to his office, to begin, very slowly, to attend to the mountain of papers that had spawned there in his absence.
It was only after the stranger had left that Hughes walked by Paul’s office door.
“Welcome home,” said Hughes.
Paul asked about their visitor. Hughes smiled with pride before he explained.
In Paul’s absence, Carter and Hughes had done what they did best: They’d made deals. Westinghouse’s new business plan—the creation of a “network of current” that stretched from coast to coast—required more hands than merely his own to man the decks. It didn’t make sense for Westinghouse to ship a whole generator and all the technicians required to set it up to Michigan, for instance; it would be much more efficient for a local shop to build it. Which suggested to Carter and Hughes that perhaps subcontracting out manufacture and installation to a series of smaller, local companies around the country would be prudent. Even Paul had to admit that it was a good plan.
And so Carter and Hughes had begun the process of buying up small manufacturing companies throughout the East and Middle West. To be sure, the Westinghouse Electric Company did not have much of a store of capital on hand. The purchases needed to be strategic, carefully considered. And in many cases they could save money by subcontracting production out to these local entities, rather than buying them outright.
The most substantial of these deals had been made with a Mr. Charles Coffin, the president of the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, based in Lynn, Massachusetts. This was the gentleman who’d been signing contracts just that morning. His company had the capability to manufacture generators from Maine to Connecticut. Mr. Coffin’s support would be invaluable.
The Westinghouse team was assembling its players.
—
Sitting in his office some days later, Paul overheard the arrival of a messenger. The boy told Martha that he had an envelope to be opened only by Mr. Cravath himself. Paul was expecting news of the case or a summons to appear in court. But the contents of the brief telegram were utterly unexpected.
“Mr. Cravath. Please hurry to the new Metropolitan Opera House right away. Will be in my dressing rooms. Have something you’ll want to see. Sincerely, Miss Agnes Huntington.”
Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward, logical manner imagined by outsiders.
—JAMES WATSON
IT TOOK PAUL just a minute to hail a carriage, but thirty-four more to ride it to Thirty-ninth Street. The Metropolitan Opera House occupied an entire square block. Seven stories tall and almost as wide, the Met stood above the less formidable sweatshops of the Garment District. Only five years old, the Yellow Brick Brewery, as people had nicknamed it, retained a number of the design elements common to its neighborhood. The building did look more fit for manufacturing than for high art.
The Met had been founded in 1883 as a great big thumbed nose in the direction of the Academy of Music, which had occupied a considerably more distinguished space at Union Square. The Academy admitted only the oldest of New York’s old money to its velvet seats. Its eighteen boxes had each been sold off to elite families some fifty years previous. None would ever be for sale again. Even as the city began producing enough millionaires to fill another three opera houses, the Academy’s board of directors would not budge. Not even the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, or the Morgans were allowed in. So those three families, and their equally new-moneyed friends, got together and built their own opera house. The Met had been an instant success, and now, five years later, all the finest productions from Europe and Philadelphia came there first when they arrived in New York. The Academy had fallen in ’86. Its manager gave a terse statement to the newspapers: “I cannot fight Wall Street.”