Lawless (55 page)

The instrument was at hand in the form of a private agency run by Allan Pinkerton. Its purpose was to provide “industrial protection” for businessmen. The term was really a code for organized spying and anti-union terrorism, with Pinkerton supplying the thugs and undercover operatives. He selected his best agent, an Irish Catholic named James McParlan, to go into the coal fields under an assumed name and infiltrate the Mollies.

On McParlan’s evidence, twenty-four alleged Mollies had been arrested and indicted. The
Union
reporter who covered the trial was no partisan of the labor movement. But even he said McParlan’s testimony linking the defendants to acts of terrorism and, at the same time, to the secret society was flimsy and unsupported.

That didn’t prevent guilty verdicts—or the hanging of ten of the defendants. There was serious doubt that all of them were guilty, but even if they were, they’d been convicted on slim evidence. Such cavalier justice enraged Gideon, and he said so in an editorial.

The editorial was clearly counter to the mood of the times, however. The night after the piece ran, the
Union’s,
office was stoned. And a couple of days later, at one of the clubs to which Gideon belonged, he bumped into Charles Dana of the
Sun.
Dana was just going in to dinner with two other members. He paused long enough to say gruffly, “Read your editorial on the Mollies. Fine prose but a false premise. Dynamite throwers don’t really deserve justice, do they? Reading what you wrote, a person might suppose you’d sold your stock in your paper and joined the anarchists.”

The implication that Gideon was a traitor to the class of men who owned newspapers stung and depressed him for days afterward.

Yes, the last few years had indeed been troubled and disillusioning. Yet as Gideon examined America’s past and speculated about its future, he saw many bright aspects, not the least of which was the essential honesty, decency and common sense he found in most ordinary citizens.

Again and again, he wished he could also find some tangible way to express his positive feelings about America. His faith in the worth of the principles on which it was founded; his belief in the goodness of most of its people; his confidence in its future despite the turmoil of the immediate past.

He wrote a Centennial editorial on the subject, but it wasn’t one of his better efforts, and it didn’t satisfy his craving. He asked Payne for ideas, but since Payne didn’t know precisely what he was after, the editor could be of little help.

Well, Gideon didn’t know what he was after either—except that he wanted a way to make a positive and personal statement about his homeland. Good ideas about how to do it continued to elude him as the spring wore on.

By age thirty-three, Gideon had acquired a few gray hairs at each temple and a reputation as one of the rising talents on Park Row. As the encounter with Dana had shown, his fellow owners disapproved of his loyalty to the labor movement. But no one denied that Theophilus Payne had taught him the trade, and done it well.

Working in tandem with Payne, Gideon had slowly begun to exert a stronger and more personal influence over the
Union.
When asked whether his paper supported the Republicans or the Democrats, he liked to answer, “Sometimes one, sometimes the other, but we always support those who have nobody else to support them.” Daphnis Miller and Sime Strelnik were usually in his mind when he made the remark.

The
Union’s
masthead now showed him to be the publisher, and he occupied a cubicle next to Payne’s. He supervised newsroom policy, watched over the paper’s financial condition, wrote editorials and from time to time traveled out of town to cover a key story and, not coincidentally, meet Julia.

During the past year, he and Payne had begun experimenting with the paper’s makeup. They had tried expanding the headline area of important stories to two or even three columns. That wouldn’t have been possible in the days when the actual type went on the press in a curved form. Then, the individual columns had to be held in place by vertical rules. But stereotyping, a process borrowed from the book industry, replaced the form with a solid metal plate that reproduced the type exactly. With the vertical rules gone, stories could be expanded beyond one column just as advertisements had been.

Illustration was becoming more important on daily papers. The
Union
began to run two or three pictures a week, each drawn by the staff news artist. To supervise production of the pictures Gideon hired a Frenchman who had experience with the zincograph process perfected in Paris in the late fifties. Line cuts, acid-etched on metal, were much faster to prepare than the older wood engravings, which had to be laboriously hand carved. Woodcuts remained better suited to the illustrated weeklies, which had longer deadlines.

In the matter of news policy, Gideon had a reputation for being much more of a radical than he actually was. Despite tiresome jokes about the name of the paper, he hadn’t turned it into a labor sheet. Certainly his sympathies still lay with the movement. But guided by Payne, he had begun to see that all causes, from the eight-hour day to female suffrage to matters of political partisanship, had to be subordinated to a newspaper’s one supreme cause—the pursuit of truth.

Of course he retained a certain inevitable interest in railroads, and a bias against railroad owners, perhaps the most powerful class of industrialists in the country. He hadn’t seen Thomas Courtleigh since 1871, and had long since stopped worrying about the man’s threats. He wasn’t even sure the harassment of late ’71 could be laid at Courtleigh’s door; there had been no repeat incidents.

Gideon continued to live in the mansion at Sixty-first and Fifth Avenue only because his children lived there. Will was now a stocky, brown-haired and rather phlegmatic boy of seven. He struck Gideon as timid, unwilling to try anything new for fear he’d upset his mother, with whom he spent most of his time. On Sundays, Gideon took his son on jaunts into the country or down to the piers. But a father was no substitute for an older brother with whom a boy could exchange confidences, and Gideon knew it.

Eleanor was his pride. She would be fourteen on her birthday. Her figure was filling out, and many people mistook her for a girl of eighteen or nineteen. She was enrolled in Miss Holsham’s Academy for Young Ladies, Margaret’s insisted-upon alternative to a public school, but she despised it.

Further, she had taken a fancy to things theatrical. She’d been in a playhouse only once, four years before. Gideon had taken her. From that time on, Margaret had raised objections about the godlessness of the theater—another of the peculiar ideals generated by her drinking.

To keep peace, Gideon bowed to her wishes and never again invited his daughter to a play. But there continued to be friction on the subject. Eleanor’s slightest reference to it would send Margaret into a tirade. Her daughter would have nothing to do with the theater! She’d better resign herself to accepting the traditional role of wife and mother! She was to prepare for it by enrolling in Vassar Female College in Poughkeepsie at the proper time. Eleanor stated just as firmly that she would not. There the impasse rested.

Gideon’s reaction to Eleanor’s interest was ambiguous. He was not particularly scandalized by the Bohemianism of actors and actresses—but he did not want a child of his, especially a daughter, drawn into that kind of life. Once when he tried to express his confusion to Theo Payne, the editor laughed and, said he understood perfectly.

“Men worry about daughters more than they worry about sons. It’s the nature of the creature, I think. Being father to a growing girl, and wondering what sly seducer lurks in your parlor, turns any man into a conservative. I speak from experience thrice over.”

So while Gideon never would have denied Eleanor permission to attend a matinee if Margaret had agreed, something in him feared her developing a passion for plays.

Gideon and Margaret hadn’t slept in the same bedroom, or done more than touch in a perfunctory way, for nearly five years. Lately he’d even started to think Will and Eleanor were growing less fond of him. Less demonstrative. He wondered whether Margaret had a hand in that.

Sometimes he considered his suspicions despicable as well as far-fetched. At other times he didn’t. His wife hardly resembled the girl he’d courted and wed in Richmond. She had put on thirty pounds, seldom wore anything except the plainest of dresses, left the house only when absolutely necessary, had no friends, and—most annoying of all—refused to keep her hair neat. He didn’t exactly know why that outraged him, but it did. Perhaps it was because it called attention to her slatternly state.

Repeatedly, he had urged her to see their physician and ask him to help cure the drinking that had now become an integral part of her life—and her means of flight from its problems. Repeatedly, Margaret denied she drank to excess, though she could no longer claim she didn’t drink at all. Her erratic step, slurred speech, and occasional outbursts of bizarre thinking were evident to all those in the household. Even the children.

Gideon continued to feel responsible for her state. Sometimes he wished he could give in to her demands. Could leave the
Union
and become a business dilettante, uninvolved and unconcerned about the world. It was what she wanted as proof that she was the dominant partner. It was the one thing he could not give.

He didn’t know whether she suspected his liaison with Julia. He did his utmost to keep it secret. He no longer loved Margaret, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her intentionally. She needed no one’s help in order to suffer, he often thought sadly.

But he saw Julia as frequently as possible.

In April of that year a new and disturbing element intruded into Gideon and Margaret’s relationship. It first manifested itself one evening at dinner. He was home, seated under the gaslights at one end of their enormously long dining room table. Margaret was at the other end. Spring rain tapped the windows overlooking Sixty-first Street, to their right. In a few minutes Gideon planned to drive back to the paper and finish an editorial objecting to the government’s de facto theft of the Indian treaty lands in the Dakota Territory.

He sipped at the hearty red Bordeaux which Matt ordered for him, and shipped from London in case lots. Matt’s paintings of American life, done from memory, were finding their way into an increasing number of prestigious exhibitions and private collections. He’d shown canvases at the last three Paris Salons, and had submitted another for the collection of American art to be displayed at the Philadelphia exposition. The painting—his largest yet—had been accepted.

Matt’s wretchedly spelled letters referred to a procession of mistresses in London, and only rarely to Dolly. She was apparently prospering as a teacher in India, and continued to bear the responsibility for raising their son Tom.

Matt had a new passion ideally suited to his talent for making quick freehand drawings. His friend Whistler had taught him how to do etchings by working directly with a needle on a wax-covered copper plate. The process was called drypoint. Matt had purchased an old star-wheel press so he could produce the plates himself, and Gideon now had one print on the wall of his office—a superb study of a London costermonger done with Matt’s usual economy and memorability of line.

Every time Gideon gazed at the print, he wished he and his brother could work on some joint project. Perhaps a volume of Matt’s drawings—published by Kent and Son. The Boston book house over which Gideon had no direct control was barely meeting expenses by reissuing old titles. The volumes were handsomely produced. But as Molly herself said, Dana Hughes was not an especially imaginative editor. Kent and Son needed at least one big success to revitalize it.

All these associated thoughts of Matt whirled through Gideon’s mind as he sipped the Bordeaux and wondered whether his brother might return to see his painting on exhibit. He’d submitted it at Gideon’s urging, and said he had no interest in attending the show in person. Perhaps some way could be found to lure him to Philadelphia.

Recalling the city brought something else to mind. Gideon set his wine goblet aside. “Margaret?”

She glanced up from her untasted food. In the gloom of the April twilight, her sallow jowls looked even more unhealthy than usual.

“What is it?”

“Just a reminder,” he responded gently. “I don’t want you to forget I’ll be going to Philadelphia early in May.”

“Philadelphia?” She shook her head. “You never told me that.”

For an instant he was tempted to snap at her. Instead, he forced patience into his voice.

“I respectfully beg to say I did. More than a month ago. I’m going to do a feature on the opening of the exhibition. Don’t you recall I told you Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil would be there along with President Grant?”

Again she shook her head, her gaze drifting toward the rain-speckled windows. “No, I don’t recall that at all. You never mentioned it.”

He shivered then, genuinely alarmed. Was she only trying to aggravate him? Or was her mind succumbing to the damaging effects of too much alcohol, exactly as her father’s had succumbed years before he died?

“You said nothing about a trip to Philadelphia to me,” she repeated. Then she focused moist brown eyes on his face. “When are you going to take me to the exposition, Gideon? When are we going as a family?”

“Later in the summer, I promise. I can’t say exactly when I’ll get away, but I assure you we’ll go.”

“That’s good to know,” she murmured, glancing away again, her eyes sleepy.

He left the house a few moments later, deeply troubled by her lapse of memory.

The moment Margaret heard Gideon’s carriage depart, she hurried upstairs, her anger mounting with each step she took.

How
dared
Gideon pretend he’d mentioned a trip to Philadelphia when he hadn’t! It was just another of his attempts to degrade her and make her feel miserable. Well, she had her own weapons in
that
little game.