The Last Days of Night(6)
Did Paul want to be Byrne’s clerk? Or Carter’s partner?
The firm of Carter, Hughes & Cravath opened its doors on January 1, 1888.
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Of paramount importance in those early days was the matter of attracting clients. Carter mined his decades of business connections. Hughes had been helpfully engaged in some minor but long-standing litigation for the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad. But Paul had nothing more to work with than a handful of school chums and a decent sales pitch. By the close of the sixth week, having failed to bring in a single dollar to the practice, Paul felt his confidence give way to disappointment. Every hour that he spent alone at that desk, in the quiet of his uselessness, revealed him to be a fraud.
His former schoolmates turned out to be neither helpful nor sympathetic. “Oh, that’s so very Paul,” they would say as he met them at their clubs for Scotch. “It must be terribly hard to get everything you want.”
In point of fact it was. But how could he illuminate the pressures and uncertainties of a position for which they would all gladly stab one another in the back? They wanted what he had. To tell someone jealous of his success that that very success was not what he might hope it to be, and was instead just another series of ever-more-demanding pressures and concerns, would be to sully his dreams. To dismiss his ambitions with what he would take, mistakenly, to be false modesty.
Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don’t feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they’re said to be blossoming. When they are praised for their precociousness or their youthful ingenuity, they will shrug it off, because in their hearts they know themselves to be ancient and decaying. It is only later, after years of achievement have freed them of insecurity, that they will be informed that they are no longer prodigies but rather merely brilliant successes. And they will cringe. Because they know themselves, only then in the waning of their prodigiousness, to be true prodigies.
Paul had wished sometimes, very privately, to be a clerk again.
And then, quite out of the blue, he’d been invited to a dinner at the estate of George Westinghouse.
It turned out that years before, Paul’s distant uncle Caleb had taken a job at a Westinghouse subsidiary in Ohio. When Caleb had overheard a senior member of the company’s staff despairing about their uncreative legal representation, he’d made a suggestion. Caleb had a nephew in New York. A brilliant young man, Caleb had explained. An absolute wunderkind who just partnered with the esteemed Walter Carter at the astounding age of twenty-six. Mr. Westinghouse should share a meal with him. The kid might have an idea or two.
When Caleb first sent word through Paul’s father that he’d recommended his nephew to the Westinghouse Electric Company, Paul felt faintly embarrassed. He was mortifyingly unqualified for such a position. He could just imagine the polite dismissal with which Westinghouse must have greeted the mention of his name.
Paul even wrote to his father to say that while the familial support was certainly well meaning, it was a bit na?ve. This was New York, not Tennessee. Erastus Cravath responded with a brief message containing two quotes from Proverbs and a reminder of Jesus’s warm embrace. It was not the first exchange of letters in which Paul felt that his father did not really understand the depth of the waters in which he swam.
And yet to Paul’s surprise a letter arrived two weeks later. “Mr. George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, requests the pleasure of your company tomorrow evening at dinner.”
On the way to Pittsburgh, Paul rode in a first-class train car for the first time in his life. For the entirety of the daylong trip, he kept his only good dinner jacket laid carefully across his knees. Paul’s greatest fear was that the jacket, hand pressed the previous night, would wrinkle. He had no replacement. He’d learned in law school that if you could keep a black dinner jacket crisp enough, you could wear it to every formal dinner without anyone noticing that it was the only one you owned.
At Pittsburgh’s Union Station, Paul was ushered onto the Glen Eyre—Westinghouse’s private train. It carried Paul—and Paul alone—the six miles to Homewood, the leafy suburb where the Westinghouse family kept their white-brick villa. A man designs enough trains, Paul thought, and they’ll give him his own locomotive. Westinghouse got his own line.
Dinner was set for sixteen. A few engineers from Westinghouse’s lab, a visiting professor from Yale, some bigwigs from the railroad industry, a German financier whose name Paul never quite caught. Marguerite Westinghouse sat them all at a table of Sèvres china and solid-gold silverware while her husband tended to his salad dressing. Marguerite explained that such was George’s way—no army of hired chefs would ever deter him from making the dressing, his mother’s recipe. Twenty years of marriage and she’d never once prepared a salad for her husband. Marguerite’s smile indicated a routine frequently repeated and still enjoyed.
George Westinghouse greeted Paul with a firm handshake and a long look in the eye. And then utterly ignored him. Westinghouse was an imposing presence. He had a bearlike frame, burly muttonchops, and a grizzled mustache so large that it completely hid both his upper lip and the majority of the lower one. He was a few inches shorter than Paul, and yet when they stood near each other, the young attorney felt dwarfed.
The dinner conversation was technical. Paul quickly gave up trying to follow along. The railroad men were old friends of Westinghouse’s from the seventies, when they’d all become millionaires together. They asked endless questions about air brakes. One of them even attempted to enlist Paul.