‘I told Nellie Molloy what to do,’ answered Rachel. ‘Your ward’s quiet for the moment. Sit down, Fey, I want to talk to you.’
Fey hooked herself into the coverall, and tied the enveloping white apron over that. She coiled her hair neatly on her neck where it made an enormous bun. Then she sat down on the bed, Rachel having taken the rocker, and waited quietly. Fey saw that withdrawn, listening look in her friend’s eyes, and knew that Rachel was waiting in silence for the moment of communication. No stranger would have noticed, the serene big-boned face showed no outward change, but Fey, who loved her, knew how often and how naturally Rachel subdued the clamor of mind and emotion to ask the Indwelling Spirit for guidance. Fey respected and understood this, though she could not share its simplicity. She, too, had had moments of mystic exaltation, but they had been violently emotional and shattering. They had always come unsummoned and resolved themselves into concrete symbols and. episodes, highly colored in memory. There was the warning of the bells, the constant inspiration of Atalaya, the first meeting with Natanay, and the vision of the Santo Niño in the cathedral. These had all had that quality of illumination and awe, these had all for a little while brought peace. But she could not control these moments, and they had nothing to do with her faith, as Rachel’s did. Of late, Fey had not thought about God at all, even at Mass. Her waking thoughts, her dreams, and her prayers had all been focused on one idea, but she had given Rachel no inkling of it.
‘I want to talk to you about your future, yours and little Lucy’s,’ said the doctor at last. ‘You know I’m fond of you both. You are like my daughter, Fey.’ She spoke matter-of-factly and to the point. The Friends did not waste words.
‘Oh, I know!’ cried Fey, and her eyes stung with rare tears. ‘And I love you better than anyone in the world except Lucita and——’ She stopped, and fear slipped across her face. What cruel trick had her tongue nearly played on her? She hated Terry, she had forgotten Terry. She had dissolved him from her life as the sun evaporated a rain puddle on the Canon Road. ‘I love you better than anybody but my baby,’ she said evenly.
Rachel, intent on her plan, had not noticed. She smiled and went on. ‘You have great aptitude for medicine, I think. Have you thought that you might become a physician?’
She misread the girl’s astonished silence, which was one of pure dismay.
‘Oh, yes, you could do it,’ said Rachel. ‘Doctor Blackwell and Doctor Daniel think it a splendid idea; you can join our classes right here, and I can coach you.’
Fey moistened her lips and looked away from Rachel’s enthusiastic face. She did not want to hurt her friend nor to disappoint her. She would not sayr ‘I loathe sick people and poor people. I loathe the Infirmary sights and smells and drabness. Human suffering disgusts me. It’s only because of you and your great kindness that I’ve endured it. I want nothing now of life but luxury and refinement for myself and the baby.’ She could not say these things, but she saw that she must check Rachel and disclose at least some part of her plan.
‘Doctor Rachel,’ she said gently, ‘I’m not unselfish like you. I am ambitious. I want money, a great deal of money. I want Lucita to have all the things I didn’t. She must never be hungry or dirty. She must have the best the world can give.’
This hankering after material riches was so alien to Rachel’s nature that she misunderstood again. ‘Why, child, you can live on here with Lucy for your three years of training. I’ll take care of you as I would the daughter I never had. You’d let me do that, wouldn’t you, Fey? ’
‘Ah, you are so good, always!’ cried the girl, her voice thickened. ‘But I must make you understand.’ She laced her fingers and her hands trembled. ‘I want power,’ she said passionately, ‘and I want money! I’ve had nothing yet, nothing. I had no home, no people of my own. I thought I had love, but I didn’t. Oh, don’t you see!—I don’t want to live here at the Infirmary as you do, working from morning till night, drudging, sacrificing, and no pay but the few dollars salary they can afford to give!’ Rachel stared at the transformed face. Fey’s cheeks glowed. Her pupils, so often hidden by the demure lids, dilated so that the dear gray merged into lambent black, sultry, vehement as a Goya gypsy.
‘I see that you are not happy here, and I was stupid to think you were,’ said Rachel.
She got up and walked to the window, turning her back on the girl while she strove to conquer bitter disappointment. There was silence in the small room, except for the baby, who gurgled cheerfully to herself in the cradle.
Gradually Rachel’s rigid back relaxed. How long, she said to herself, does it take to learn that no one may control another’s life?—and her hurt vanished.
She came back to Fey and sat beside her on the bed. ‘I had forgotten how young thee is, dear,’ she said. ‘Forgive me.’ And she went on in the plain speech which she never used to non-Quakers, but had lately slipped into with Fey. ‘Thee doesn’t know the world yet; power and money aren’t to be had for the asking. There’s nothing open to women which will bring those.’
‘Ah, but there is,’ said Fey. ‘For there are men who have them.’
‘I see,’ said Rachel. How stupid she had been and a little ridiculous too! Why should she have assumed that because Fey had had one bitter disillusionment, and because she had always seemed so self-contained, dedicated to her work and baby; how had she dared assume that Fey had no interest in men? This talk of power and money was self-delusion, thought Rachel, pitying. It was the imperious urge of that ripened, seductive body speaking, and a natural desire for love. Rachel was too fine a woman to feel a lessening of affection because its object did not fit into the mold she had made, and she touched Fey’s arm in one of her rare caresses. ‘I do understand now. But thee must be practical, my poor child. Thee is married already. I think in this case thee might rightly get free by divorce, but where in the world will a divorced woman with a child find a good husband? ’
‘I think I shall manage,’ said Fey. She smiled into the kind eyes beside her, but she could not tell more. She was not ashamed of her intention, but she knew that to Rachel it would be shocking and preposterous. She knew, too, unhappily, that it might some day lead to a breach between them, but nothing caused her to falter, no fear of pain or doubts of success. ‘ I think, Doctor Rachel,’ she said, ‘that if one wills a thing to happen with all one’s’strength, if one wants it hard enough and long enough, and is willing to pay the price, one is sure to get it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Rachel soberly; ‘but thee has left God out, Fey, in all this willing and wishing.’ .
Fey drew a long, unsteady breath. She looked at Rachel and she saw beside her the face of Natanay, and that the gaze of both of them mingled into sadness. They shared a quietness and a selflessness which shut her out; behind the doctor’s eyes as behind Natanay’s there was a secret wisdom.
‘I don’t know where or what God is,’ she said, half-angrily, ‘but I have faith in myself.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘Some day thee’ll learn that’s not enough,’ she said, and changed the subject. ‘Thee is welcome to stay here as long as thee wishes, Fey. I want thee to.’ And perhaps, after all, she may enter the medical classes, she added to herself, for she saw little hope of any other future for the girl.
Fey thanked her by a warm kiss, but when the doctor had gone out and shut the door, she pulled the morning Tribune from the table and re-read an item. It said, ‘ Mr. Simeon Tower, the financier, has recently closed his villa at Long Branch and returned to his New York residence.’ Fey put down the paper and opened the small pine cupboard which served as closet. She took out a new suit. It was of grosgrain, a shade called ‘feuille morte,’ a vivid yellow-brown trimmed with darker bands of velvet. It was a color few could wear, but it made Fey’s white skin whiter, her hair blacker, and her gray eyes more luminous.
Rachel had during the past months insisted upon Fey’s going out each afternoon for air and exercise. It was during these expeditions that she had bought
the dress, also bronze kid shoes and a tiny velvet bonnet to match. She had spent for these the money left her by Terry, and its use to buy this particular outfit gave her a savage satisfaction.
She picked up Lucita, who responded by a gratified crow.
‘I’ll not be gone too long, mi corazón,’ she whispered into the little fat neck. The baby gurgled and opened her eyes wide. They were blue and would stay blue. Like my father’s, thought Fey, and the hair, too, may be like his was once. She has nothing of Terry, nothing. ‘Be good and patient until I come back,’ she said to the baby. ‘ It is for us, you know.’
She carried Lucita into the adjacent nursery, where she put her in a crib amongst the other babies. She hated to do this, for the others were sickly and wizened, and they kept up an incessant whimper, but the little nurse would keep an eye on Lucita until Fey returned. Fey glanced at the wall clock and its swaying brass pendulum. Two-thirty. Plenty of time.
She returned to her room, washed, and dressed very carefully in the feuille morte suit. It gave precisely the impression she wished. The lines of the tight bodice accented her bosom and small waist, but discreetly so that one thought it accidental. Just as feuille morte was striking and exotic on her, yet, after all, it was brown. Ño one could consider brown flashy. The bonnet left most of her magnificent hair uncovered, and instead of her usual prim knot, she had gathered it loosely into a net, where it made a tremendous ‘waterfall’ to her shoulders; a fashionable effect seldom achieved by other women without the lavish use of false hair. When she was ready, she leaned close to the mirror and applied coral salve to her lips, and she made no attempt to reduce their full outline to the rosebud pout which beauty demanded.
Last of all, she put a paper in her pocketbook. On it she had written an address in her unpracticed but small incisive script: ‘57 Wall Street.’
Chapter Eleven
SIMEON TOWER was born in 1830 in the back room of a small hardware shop on the outskirts of Danbury, Connecticut. He was born Simon Turmstein. His father was an enterprising Jewish peddler who had chafed at life in the Frankfort ghetto, saved his pfennigs, and bought steerage passage for the new world, decades before this method of escape had occurred to others of his patient race. Isaac Turmstein had not liked the confinement of New York, and he had wandered on foot through most of New England—his peddler’s pack slung over his shoulder—until one day he happened upon Danbury and Annie Mason. She was plump and blonde and placid, the daughter of a mill hand employed by the newly established Mallory Hat Company. She fell in love with the dark romantic-looking peddler, and he, being attracted by her pink blondeness and being also tired of roaming, soon married her.
There was opposition from Annie’s family, not particularly because Isaac was a Jew, which meant very little to the provincial Yankees, but because he was a foreigner and spoke with a heavy guttural accent. However, he soon proved himself an adaptable family man, amiably joined the Masons at worship in the Congregational Church, and improved his English as much as possible. The Turmsteins set up a store on South Street, where they sold tin pots and pans, iron skillets, nails, screws, and simple tools. Isaac’s father-in-law soon became reconciled to the marriage and sent them customers. They prospered in a modest way. Isaac gave good value and was respected, but he was never quite one of them. His fellow citizens had trouble pronouncing his name. By an analogy of sound it gradually became ‘Tombstone.’ ‘Rim down to Old Jew Tombstone’s and get me a pennyworth of nails,’ fathers would tell their children, and the children always giggled at the incongruous name. Isaac did not mind. One who had spent thirty years amongst the niggling restrictions, the indignities and sometimes bloody terror of the Frankfort ‘ Judengasse,’ would scarcely mind a sobriquet, which was patronizing certainly, but on the whole affectionate. Simeon, however, minded intensely from the moment that he was old enough to understand.
When at fourteen he took his first job as bar-boy in the Taylor Tavern, he anglicized Turmstein by translating the first syllable, and by adding an ‘e’ to Simon he transformed it into unequivocal Yankee. Much later, when his shrewdness, luck, and financial dexterity had brought him to New York, he was glad of this. An easy, English-sounding name was a distinct asset, and August Belmont, born Schoenberg, had already set a precedent.
Of the Turmsteins’ five children, Simeon was the only one who resembled his mother, and the only one who caused her constant heartache and worry. As a child he was exceptionally self-willed and moody, and he was delicate. This gave him a frequent means of avoiding school, which he hated. When he was seven, he developed a marked stammer, and this, of course, made him the butt of the other children. Recitations were a nightmare. He would stand on one foot, scarlet with misery even to his scalp under the tow hair, his small blunt fingers clenched in anguish, and recite, ‘“S” s-s-s-t-t-ands f-for the s-s-s-erpent lowly and m-m-mean,’ and the whole class, giggling and squirming joyfully, would accompany him in a chorus of ‘s-s-s-s,’ and ‘t-t-t-t’s. They called him 'Little T-t-t-Tombstone,’ and without special malice, but simply because he was different, left him out of all their play and projects.
Isaac was sorry for his son, but he much preferred the rest of his brood, a merry, uncomplicated lot with soft dark eyes and slightly aquiline noses who took life as it came.
Simeon endured school spasmodically until he was fourteen, when he reached adolescence and his full height of five feet seven. He broadened into a wide, stocky build and became powerful. He discovered in himself at the same time an independence and contempt for the society of the other boys, though before this he had passionately yearned for their approval. He announced that he had had enough schooling and was going to work.
Isaac was saddened; he had the Jewish reverence for education; but he was forced to admit that the boy knew enough to get on in the world. He read and wrote perfectly and he had a genius for figures. Since he was ten, Simeon had handled the hardware store’s bookkeeping in half the time that it took Isaac to do it.
From then on Simeon ran his own life. He changed his name and took the job at Taylor’s Tavern. This did not please him for long. There were too many people in Danbury who knew him as ‘Little T-t-t-Tombstone.’ One day he packed his belongings in a carpetbag, bade his mother an affectionate but inarticulate farewell, and, having already arranged a lift in a farm wagon, went to Bridgeport aind got a job at the Stanley House as a waiter. When he left the Stanley five years later, he was assistant manager and he had learned a great many things. His stammer was nearly gone—it had improved the moment he left home—and he had developed a talent for telling stories, mostly smutty, since these had the greatest success with the Stanley’s commercial patrons. He had also acquired a hearty, booming laugh. He was known as a smart, jolly fellow, mighty helpful, too. Sim Tower’d always know the name of a complacent girl if you wanted one, and no matter how late in the day you asked him, he could fix you up with a couple of seats to the traveling shows. You gave him a thumping commission, of course, but it was worth it.
Nobody suspected that the jolly good fellow never himself patronized the complacent girls or took time to visit the theater. He had, however, an absorbing secret life. Every spare hour and all his evenings he spent locked in his room with a ledger full of figures. He devoured the financial pages of the New York newspapers, he watched the stock-market quotations as anxiously as any bookie ever watched the Saratoga race entries, and he juggled many mythical hundreds of thousands in his ledger. At first he made many mistakes and lost paper fortunes. But gradually he developed a feel for it, and he took five hundred dollars of the twenty-five hundred he had saved and put them with a New York brokerage firm, Slate and Hatch.
He pestered these brokers unmercifully for information, he kept charts, and aided by the country’s expansion and a rising market, he had soon doubled his money. This, however, was practice; he was too shrewd to plunge, and geographically too far away from the financial center. The time for New York would come, but in the meantime he
demanded and got a raise from the Stanley House, unobtrusively studied business methods in Bridgeport, and awaited opportunity. It came when he was twenty-two.
One night in the Stanley bar he overheard a disgruntled mill-owner complaining bitterly over a glass of beer. The man, it seemed, had a small woolen mill on the Saugatuck River and he was sick of the whole business. ‘Headaches all the time,’ he grumbled. ‘ If it ain’t the price of raw wool, or the looms breaking down, it’s the hands wanting more pay or a ten-hour day. Could I find anyone fool enough to take the blasted mill, I’d be off to Californy in a trice.’
Simeon said nothing, but the next morning at dawn he hired a horse, rode to the Saugatuck, and inspected the mill. He also went through the company’s books, by the simple method of telling the unsuspicious old bookkeeper that he had been authorized. He saw that, even with the present muddle-headed management, the mill was worth about five thousand. He walked again through the mill, and he saw where new machinery might be put in and inefficiency banished. He rode thoughtfully back to Bridgeport and decided to take a chance.
He found the owner in the Stanley bar and commiserated with him. ‘Too bad Tyson’s canceling that felt order,’ he said sympathetically. The owner had heard nothing of cancellation, but as he also knew nothing of Simeon’s visit to the mill, he thought the Stanley’s manager must have picked up an authentic rumor. Anyway, he was sick of the place and wished to head West. After Simeon had spent three hours feeding him liquor and talking, the man was frightened, too. By evening he had sold the mill to Simeon for eighteen hundred dollars cash.
That was the beginning. Simeon promptly moved to a shack beside his mill and stayed there. He kept the books himself and he supervised every detail. His five years’ experience at hotel management proved invaluable. He picked the right foremen and he was tactful in smoothing over contentions. He introduced new machinery and refurbished the old, and he put every cent back into thè business.