Thunder City (3 page)

Dolan was suddenly serene. Pleas for money were solid ground. He’d been afraid he was going to be asked for a job. Charlotte, who for some mysterious female reason had taken a liking to the young man, would make life difficult if he turned him down, yet he didn’t want to alienate Abner Junior by employing a son who had decided to desert the family enterprise. Money was another thing entirely. To challenge a man’s decision in regard to his funds was as indelicate as questioning his religion.

“I heard this fellow Ford was out of the automobile business.”

“He closed his plant for lack of capital. Now he has the support of Alexander Malcolmson.”

“The coal dealer?”

“He has faith in Mr. Ford, as have I. Five other men are interested: John Gray, a banker, and John Anderson and Horace Rackham, who are successful lawyers. Another John and Horace, the Dodge brothers, have agreed to manufacture engines and other parts in return for shares. Mr. Ford feels that he can arrange a hundred thousand in capital if he can raise a quarter of that amount in cash. Five thousand would entitle me to twenty percent of the common stock. I own a thousand dollars in shares in Crownover Coaches. I wish to borrow the rest.”

“Have you approached your father?” Dolan asked with a smile.

“My father is a traditionalist.” Harlan clamped his mouth tight at the end of the statement.

“Surely nothing so bad as that.” This young man had begun not to amuse him. “Why did you come to me? There are banks.”

“I’ve been to the banks. The bankers are all very patient until they learn my father isn’t interested. They’re businessmen.”

“Automobile manufacture is not a business?”

“It’s more than that. It’s the future. It occurred to me that a politician such as yourself might be expected to see beyond the next fiscal year. When I was small, I saw a picture of you in the newspaper, wearing overalls and leaning on a hoe in one of those vegetable gardens Hazen Pingree started throughout the city when he was mayor. I never forgot it. When everyone else was complaining about the bad economy, you and Pingree were doing something about it, to feed the hungry. Men who take action is what the automobile industry is all about.”

So now it was an industry. Dolan remembered the picture very well. It had elected him to city council, his first public office. Charlotte had had to let out his old switchman’s overalls, and he had borrowed the hoe from an unemployed bricklayer who was tending the garden. Ping’s Potato Patches, as they were called, hadn’t done a jot to improve conditions among the poor, but they had gotten the old man a statue in Grand Circus Park, if they ever got around to finishing the thing.

“The last time I invested money, I lost every penny,” Dolan said. “Although
lost
is not accurate. It’s on the bottom of Lake Michigan with the Great Lakes Stove Company’s first and only shipment.”

“I’m not asking for an investment, but a loan. I intend to repay it with interest come fire or flood. The risk is mine.”

“The money is not.”

“Are you turning me down?”

“I am. We live in an age of interesting inventions, of which the automobile is just one. I’m afraid I haven’t the vision for which you credit me; I can’t tell which will survive and which will be supplanted by the next interesting invention. If you lose your investment, you will remain indebted to me, and you will come to resent me for it. I value my association with your family too much to jeopardize it.”

“The decision is final?”

“I’m afraid it is.” Dolan smiled. “Please give my regards to your father and mother. I haven’t seen them since the last bicycle race I attended on Belle Isle. The elections,” he added by way of explanation.

“You’re making a mistake, Mr. Dolan.”

He frowned. The boy was no gentleman. Dolan was not either, by way of birth and occupation; he had long ago resigned himself to that truth, but it upset him that someone could take the privilege so far for granted as to reject it out of hand. It was like a man born to wealth telling a poor man that money was not important.

“Good luck to you, Mr. Crownover.”

After Harlan had shaken his hand and left, Big Jim Dolan sat back down and set fire to a cigar. Had he not made it his business not to muck around in another man’s business, he might have considered warning Abner Crownover that he was risking too much to trust his loading dock to his middle son.

I
N CONTRAST WITH THE PRINCELY
portrait of James Aloysius Dolan that hung behind Big Jim’s desk in Corktown, the likeness of the founder of Crownover Coaches might have been lost in his son’s office at the corner of Shelby and Jefferson were it not for the oversize frame in which it was matted and mounted. It was a three-by-five-inch tintype, orange and wrinkled, of a bulldog face in a stiff collar and pale side-whiskers, a fleshy badge of mid-Victorian prosperity with an incongruously hollow stare, as if the eyes had been punched out of a mask. The picture was made in 1859, the year John Brown hanged for treason. Abner would stand trial that same year for conspiracy in the raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia; although the jury would vote for acquittal, the ardent abolitionism that had driven him to meet with Brown and Frederick Douglass at the Detroit end of the Underground Railroad and agree to help finance their bold plan to arm the slaves would destroy his reputation as a stable businessman. He sold his wagon-making business and died, a broken man, shortly before the Second Battle of Bull Run.

Abner Crownover’s descendants weren’t quite sure what to do with him. They felt little concern about the wife and three children he deserted in England to build wagons for pioneers departing the Northwest Territory for Oregon; such footnotes were infinitesimal in the book of the Great Expansion. They pointed with pride at the site in Miami Square where the wheels and sideboards were fitted, reminded people that A. Crownover &Company had been the largest private employer in antebellum Detroit, and insisted that its founder’s name be included in the roll of those who were present under the oaks in Jackson when the Republican Party was created in 1854. That he should have thrown all this over in favor of an idealistic dream was a subject upon which they chose to remain silent. Treason was one thing, and a bad enough job at that; it was the poor business implicit in the decision that they abhorred.

Abner Crownover II seldom mentioned his father, and since the age of eleven, when he had gone to work as a grease boy in the firm that had once belonged to his family, had corrected people when they addressed him as “Junior.” He considered himself as much the founder of the company as was his father. Hard, uncomplaining work and perceptive suggestions made deferentially and through channels had earned him an executive position at an age at which the sons of most successful men were starting college. In that capacity he persuaded his superiors to acquire a bankrupt manufacturer of short-haul freight vehicles and passenger coaches. The day of the great wagon trains was coming to an end; within five years Crownover &Company had abandoned wagon making altogether for the business of providing brass-fitted carriages for the well-to-do. A mechanic at heart, Abner worked out an ingenious suspension system that smoothed cobblestones and potholes and delivered the 400 to their destinations with diamonds and silk tiles intact. The Crownover opera coach, bearing the firm’s elegant coronet in gold leaf on the door, became a staple among the gentlefolk of the Gilded Age.

Then came the Panic of ’73. Overextended members of the board of directors had reason to thank young Abner for buying out their shares at a more favorable rate than the stunned market offered, and at an age when most young men of good family were attending college, “Junior” acquired controlling interest in Crownover Coaches. His story was written up in
Harper’s
and inspired a laudatory book written by a journalist from Toledo, handsomely bound in green cloth with gold, circus-style lettering, entitled
The Coach King.
It sold well throughout the end of the nineteenth century to readers whose shelves sagged beneath the weight of volumes by Horatio Alger and G. A. Henty. In the meantime the plant moved from Miami Square to its present larger quarters, with two floors of offices separated by soundproofing from the hammer clatter and wailing steam saws at ground level. Crownover vehicles had been made to order for Governors Pingree of Michigan and Cleveland of New York, William Randolph Hearst, and Sarah Bernhardt. A grateful nation had presented Admiral Dewey with a Crownover cabriolet in mahogany with ivory side panels in honor of the victory at Manila. William McKinley rode to his second inauguration in a one-of-a-kind Crownover phaeton with gold-plated headlamps and the presidential seal inlaid in the door.

The nation’s youngest tycoon was now in his fifties. Long hours and total responsibility for the operation of his company had added twenty years to his appearance, disappointing those visitors who expected, on the evidence of
The Coach King,
to meet a man in whom some semblance of youth still resided. His pale hair, fine as spun sugar and cropped close to his pink scalp, was so little removed from total baldness that it might as well have fallen out years ago. The long upper lip, which in the tender years had contributed to his boyishness, gave him in age the face of a mummified monkey. His glittering black browless eyes did nothing to detract from this impression. In recent years he had formed the habit of sitting motionless and unspeaking behind his plain desk, staring with his bright simian eyes at speakers, then dismissing them with nothing more than a reference to the time. These speakers repaired directly to the bars of the Pontchartrain and Metropole, as much in search of human contact as refreshment. Abner II was not a warm man. It was said his first wife had committed suicide because of loneliness.

In fact she had simply died, albeit of neglect and a related condition; scarlet fever, however, was announced as the cause. He had married again in 1876, scandalizing Edith Hampton’s eastern aristocratic family with the notion of a grease boy entering its halls. Edith gave birth to six children, four of whom survived infancy. The daughter, Katherine, eloped at fourteen with an adventurer bound for the Oklahoma territory and vanished from the family history. Abner III, the oldest of the three boys, became president of the Detroit office of Crownover Coaches in 1898, and was reassigned to an executive position with fewer responsibilities and a more impressive-sounding title when it became clear that pressure did not bring out the best in him; he was, in truth, incapable of making a decision and holding to it. For his replacement, Abner II passed over Harlan, his second son, and promoted young Edward from the upholstery shop. He would assume control of the company upon his father’s retirement.

Harlan was the family disappointment. His reluctance from an early age to take part in discussions related to the business was interpreted as evidence of a slow brain, an affliction common among the Hamptons, who spent their days lawn bowling and adding new wings to the ancestral mansion in Rhode Island. The foremanship of the loading dock in Detroit went to Harlan.

On this day early in the new century, Abner II directed Winthrop, his secretary, to place a telephone call to the Cincinnati office. Cincinnati bought most of the materials consumed in the manufacture of Crownover vehicles. Abner had suspected for some time that the director culled the quality items from each shipment for use in Cincinnati, sending inferior grades to Boston and Detroit. Despite all his best efforts to persuade his branch managers to subordinate the interests of their fiefdoms to the good of the company as a whole, some stubborn pockets of feudalism remained from the dark days of his father’s tenure. If this morning’s conversation did not go well, he was determined to dismiss the man. He hoped it would go well. Roosevelt’s trustbusters were making it difficult to find executive replacements who had not been disgraced in the Republican press.

While he was waiting for the call to go through, he instructed Winthrop to admit his son Edward, who had been lingering in the outer office for twenty minutes.

“Good morning, Father.”

“It is. I saw a robin.” Abner seldom failed to treat conventional greetings literally. “Sit down. How is your wife?” He never remembered his daughter-in-law’s name. He could; he did not. In so far as he subscribed to scientific theories, he believed that the human memory was finite, and that if one were not selective, the time would come when for every new fact one admitted, an old one would have to be evicted. Beyond that, he approved of his son’s choice. The woman was practically invisible.

“She’s well, sir. I’ll tell her you asked.” Edward hesitated. He resembled his father, except for his eyes, which were large, soft, and bovine. His wire-rimmed spectacles were largely unnecessary and served merely to create severity. His old-fashioned muttonchops, long and thick and combed straight out from the corners of his jaw, fulfilled a similar purpose. Unlike Abner he was inclined to be fleshy, and such adornments gave his portliness an air of nineteenth-century gravity, more stable than self-indulgent. In ten years he would be morbidly obese. “I wish you would have a talk with Harlan. He’s neglecting his duties at the dock.”

“In what way?”

“Well, to begin with, he asked for an hour off yesterday. He was fifteen minutes late returning.”

“You timed him yourself?”

“Of course not. I was informed of the fact by Mr. Daily.”

“Did Harlan give Ted Daily a reason for his tardiness?”

“No. He did apologize,” he added, in a sudden show of sibling support.

“Did he say why he wanted the time off?”

“Mr. Daily says no.” He seemed about to go on. He did not.

“I assume Daily subtracted the fifteen minutes from his card.”

“Of course.”

“That being the case, I cannot see why you felt compelled to bring this to me. Particularly when it involved waiting twenty minutes to report fifteen minutes of delinquency. Given that, which of you is more guilty of neglecting his duties?”