“Well, he can’t have it that way. I want you there.”
“You know I have no experience in business.”
“I know—but it’s your money he’ll be talking about.”
You can’t know people like the Bakers unless you are born knowing them. Acquaintance, even friendship, is a different matter. I know them because Hawleys and Bakers were alike in blood, place of origin, experience, and past fortune. This makes for a kind of nucleus walled and moated against outsiders. When my father lost our money, I was not edged completely out. I am still acceptable as a Hawley to Bakers for perhaps my lifetime because they feel related to me. But I am a poor relation. Gentry without money gradually cease to be gentry. Without money, Allen, my son, will not know Bakers and his son will be an outsider, no matter what his name and antecedents. We have become ranchers without land, commanders without troops, horsemen on foot. We can’t survive. Perhaps that is one reason why the change was taking place in me. I do not want, never have wanted, money for itself. But money is necessary to keep my place in a category I am used to and comfortable in. All this must have worked itself out in the dark place below my thinking level. It emerged not as a thought but as a conviction.
“Good afternoon,” Mrs. Baker said. “So glad you could come. You’ve neglected us, Mary. Hasn’t it been a glorious day? Did you enjoy the service? For a clergyman I think he’s such an interesting man.”
“We don’t see you nearly often enough,” Mr. Baker said. “I remember your grandfather sitting in that very chair and reporting that the dirty Spaniards had sunk the Maine.[34] He spilled his tea, only it wasn’t tea. Old Cap’n Hawley used to lace his rum with a little tea. He was a truculent man, some thought a quarrelsome man.”
I could see that Mary was first shaken and then pleased at this warmth. Of course she didn’t know I had promoted her to be an heiress. A reputation for money is almost as negotiable as money itself.
Mrs. Baker, her head jerking with some nervous disorder, poured tea into cups as thin and fragile as magnolia petals, and her pouring hand was the only steady part of her.
Mr. Baker stirred with a thoughtful spoon. “I don’t know whether I love tea or the ceremony of it,” he said. “I like all ceremonies—even the silly ones.”
“I think I understand,” I said. “This morning I felt comfortable in the service because it had no surprises. I knew the words before they were said.”
“During the war, Ethan—listen to this, ladies, and see if you can remember anything like it—during the war I served as a consultant to the Secretary of War. I spent some time in Washington.”
“I hated it,” said Mrs. Baker.
“Well, there was a big military tea, a real doozer, maybe five hundred guests. The ranking lady was the wife of a five-star general and next in importance was the lady of a lieutenant general. Mrs. Secretary, the hostess, asked the five-star lady to pour the tea and Mrs. Three-Stars to pour coffee. Well, the top lady refused because, and I quote her, ‘Everyone knows coffee outranks tea.’ Now, did you ever hear that?” He chuckled. “As it turned out, whisky outranked everybody.”
“It was such a restless place,” Mrs. Baker said. “People moved before they had time to gather a set of habits, or manners.”
Mary told her story of an Irish tea in Boston with the water boiling in round tubs over an open fire and served with tin ladles. “And they don’t steep. They boil,” she said. “That tea will unsettle varnish on a table.”
There must be ritual preliminaries to a serious discussion or action, and the sharper the matter is, the longer and lighter must the singing be. Each person must add a bit of feather or a colored patch. If Mary and Mrs. Baker were not to be a part of the serious matter, they would long since have set up their own pattern of exchange. Mr. Baker had poured wine on the earth of conversation and so had my Mary, and she was pleased and excited by their attentiveness. It remained for Mrs. Baker and for me to contribute and I felt it only decent to be last.
She took her turn and drew her source from the teapot as the others had. “I remember when there were dozens of kinds of tea,” she offered brightly. “Why, everyone had recipes for nearly everything. I guess there wasn’t a weed or a leaf or a flower that wasn’t made into some kind of tea. Now there are only two, India and China, and not much China. Remember tansy and camomile and orange-leaf and flower—and—and cambric?”
“What’s cambric?” Mary asked.
“Equal parts hot water and hot milk. Children love it. It doesn’t taste like milk and water.” That accounted for Mrs. Baker.
It was my turn, and I intended to make a few carefully meaningless remarks about the Boston Tea Party, but you can’t always do what you intended. Surprises slip out, not waiting for permission.
“I went to sleep after service,” I heard me say. “I dreamed of Danny Taylor, a dreadful dream. You remember Danny.”
“Poor chap,” said Mr. Baker.
“Once we were closer than brothers. I had no brother. I guess we were brothers in a way. I don’t carry it out, of course, but I feel I should be my brother Danny’s keeper.”
Mary was annoyed with me for breaking the pattern of the conversation. She took a small revenge. “Ethan gives him money. I don’t think it’s right. He just uses it to get drunk.”
“Wellll!” said Mr. Baker.
“I wonder—anyway the dream was a noonmare. I give him so little—a dollar now and then. What else can he do with a dollar but get drunk? Maybe with a decent amount he could get well.”
“No one would dare do that,” Mary cried. “That would be after killing him. Isn’t that so, Mr. Baker?”
“Poor chap,” Mr. Baker said. “A fine family the Taylors were. It makes me sick to see him this way. But Mary’s right. He’d probably drink himself to death.”
“He is anyway. But he’s safe from me. I don’t have a decent amount to give him.”
“It’s the principle,” Mr. Baker said.
Mrs. Baker contributed a feminine savagery: “He should be in an institution where they could look after him.”
All three were annoyed with me. I should have stayed with the Boston Tea Party.
Strange how the mind goes romping, playing blindman’s buff or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey when it should be using every observation to find a path through the minefield of secret plans and submerged obstacles. I understood the house of Baker and the house of Hawley, the dark walls and curtains, the funereal rubber plants unacquainted with sun; the portraits and prints and remembrances of other times in pottery and scrimshaw, in fabrics and wood which bolt it to reality and to permanence. Chairs change with style and comfort but chests and tables, bookcases and desks, relate to a solid past. Hawley was more than a family. It was a house. And that was why poor Danny held onto Taylor Meadow. Without it, no family—and soon not even a name. By tone and inflection and desire, the three sitting there had canceled him. It may be that some men require a house and a history to reassure themselves that they exist—it’s a slim enough connection, at most. In the store I was a failure and a clerk, in my house I was Hawley, so I too must be unsure. Baker could offer a hand to Hawley. Without my house, I too would have been canceled. It was not man to man but house to house. I resented the removal from real of Danny Taylor, but I couldn’t stop it. And this thought sharpened and tempered me. Baker was going to try to refurbish Hawley for Baker’s participation in Mary’s fancied inheritance. Now I was on the edge of the minefield. My heart hardened against my selfless benefactor. I felt it harden and grow wary and dangerous. And with its direction came the feeling of combat, and the laws of controlled savagery, and the first law is: Let even your defense have the appearance of attack.
34
Spaniards had sunk the Maine: On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS