The ferry bumped ashore in the sunlight, a thin sunlight such as comes with the end of summer when the mornings are cool but the woods still hold their green. Half a dozen men disembarked under the flickering pattern of leaf-shadows from the big trees, and started up the path toward the Lake House. They were the part of the House staff not shown to patrons—looking more like the workers discharged by a factory whistle, in drab overcoats and sweaters, caps and felt hats. Most of them were smoking cigarettes and talking about a prize-fight that had come off the night before. Marshall Kendrick listened to their talk, a little off to one side of the group as they walked. There was something plain and objective about the technique of a right hook, as opposed to some of the more troubling questions of life, which made it a relief to think about on occasion.
Bill Harolday was standing at the top of the path when they reached it. He would have looked at home in a middle-weight prize ring himself, with his thick winged moustache and a dark face whose aspect was toughened by a slightly crooked nose. He was the money genius who managed the Lake House proper, but was also personally involved in the tougher underside of the operation that doubled its profits.
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and pointed it over his shoulder toward the doors. “The boss is here,” he said. “He wants to see all of us together out back before anybody gets started.”
He turned and fell in ahead of them as they crossed under the dead-looking wires of the electric-light arches and walked across to the open main doors. They went inside and followed Bill Harolday through the echoing halls. The rooms all had that empty, littered look that any place has the day after a party, only with the Lost Lake House this was its condition every morning. The men’s boots clumped on the polished marble floor without the least consideration of its expensiveness; one man pinched out the stub of his cigarette and tossed it in a corner.
They passed along a row of French windows, out a back door onto the smooth green lawn of the gardens, and then took a narrow footpath which also was not the province of patrons down through the bushes to the boathouse. Maurice Vernon was here with three or four other men gathered around him—standing with his well-shod feet apart and looking, as always, ready to figure prominently in a newspaper photograph. As the newcomers joined them he took his unlit cigar out of his mouth and, looking around, addressed the group at large.
“All right, listen up,” he said. “I’ve got a tip that the police are likely going to raid us again sometime this week. It’ll be the same old routine for us, hear? I want you all here at night, all this week. You’ll be paid for it. You all know what you’re responsible for—end of the tunnel, main cellar entrance, furnace outlets”—he pointed the cigar at a different man as he named each location. “Before dark see that they’re locked and camouflaged, then just stick around. At the first sign of trouble, double-check your area and stand by—you’ve all been through it before.”
Marshall had hung back a few steps outside the group, listening without really being a part of it. It was not so easy to pretend to himself that he wasn’t a part of it, given that he was freely allowed to hear these conferences. But at least he had no part in taking precautions against a raid. He’d never yet had to lie to a police officer, or help conceal contraband in the face of a search warrant…it was the last and only thing he could take some small comfort from.
Bill Harolday and Vernon were in the midst of a debate. “Yeah, but what kind of a tip have they got?” said Harolday. “They can’t have anything on any of those outlets, but suppose somebody’s tipped ’em on the speakeasy chimney? They could shut us down—and you know the only reason we’ve been able to keep the operation going so smooth is because of the nightclub racket on top—all those people coming and going for cover.”
Maurice Vernon shook his head. “I’m not worried about that,” he said. “A tip on the speakeasy could only come from a guest. Sid’s been almighty careful about who he issues cards to, and anybody who holds one knows better than to bring in anyone they can’t trust.” He laughed. “The ‘vow of secrecy’ gag has double-stitched it too. That was a brilliant idea, running that for all it’s worth. It’s the way this crowd’s minds work. If we told ’em our lives depended on it they wouldn’t pay any attention, but make it a gag and they eat it up.”
“The city’s gunning for us,” said Bill Harolday grimly, little reassured, and looking more like a prize-fighter than ever. “They know by now the stuff can’t be coming from anywhere outside the city limits.”
“We’ve got the cards,” said Maurice Vernon. “For now we stand pat. Time enough to decide whether to switch up the timing of our runs after this next raid. I’ll know more then. For myself, I’m not worried. Our set-up here is foolproof so long as everyone does his job right. You’re all clear on it?”
There was a series of nods and affirmations from the assembled men. Vernon nodded. “All right. You can get to work now.”
The men dispersed, heading for their tasks on different parts of the island. Marshall turned to go too, but before he had taken more than a few steps Maurice Vernon’s voice called him back. “Wait a minute, Marsh, I want to talk to you.”
Marshall circled around and came back, wondering whether his reluctance was marked enough to be noticeable. Maurice Vernon at any rate did not seem to notice. He gave a brisk flip of the cigar in his fingers. “Going to need you to help out back here this week,” he said. “I want Jones out by the ferry this time, so you can take over the boathouse.” He took some keys from his vest pocket and turned them over with a well-manicured thumb, looking for the one he wanted. He found it, jingled the others back into his palm and held the key out to Marshall. “Jones will show you the ropes—I’ve already told him. You probably know most of it anyhow. Fix the trapdoor so it’s covered but doesn’t look suspicious, only unlock the boathouse if a cop shows you a warrant, and don’t act like you’ve got anything to hide. Routine stuff.”
Marshall half opened his mouth, and then stopped. He realized he had no reasonable excuse. Willing to do most any kind of work, he had said.
“I—don’t know,” he said. He shook his head, trying to seem uncertain. “I’ve never had charge of anything like that before. I might mess it up.”
“Don’t worry about it!” said Maurice Vernon. “You can handle this all right. You’ve never slipped up on any job you’ve been given yet.” The praise stung in a way Vernon almost certainly never suspected. “Here.” He extended his hand with the key a little further.
Marshall took the boathouse key slowly into his hand—a large flat key, slightly tarnished-looking and engraved with the same entwined “LLH” that emblazoned the main doors of the House. He looked up at Vernon, who was watching him with quirked eyebrows, waiting for his answer. This was his chance, he realized—if Maurice Vernon got the idea that he was scared, or having a twinge of conscience, he might just decide he didn’t want Marshall around here any more. Bill Harolday was still standing there too, wearing his usual grim expression…it wouldn’t take much to make him suspicious. If Marshall was fired, it would at least cut the Gordian knot of guilt and indecision he had tied for himself, and he might not regret it too much afterwards.
Maurice Vernon sounded both impatient and amused. “What’s the matter, Marsh? Something bothering you?”
Marshall tried to smile. He glanced at the monogrammed key and back at his employer. “No,” he said. “It’s—it’s a big job, that’s all.”
Vernon laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll manage. Okay, get on to work now. And remember, every night this week.”
Marshall left him and trudged up the hill toward the tool sheds, a short distance above the boathouse. He glanced up to his left, where the figures of two other men were cresting the hill along the footpath that led to the camouflaged access to the underground furnaces. Vernon was right—their preparations were foolproof. Marshall had seen a police raid once before, one of the nights he had been there. The police had found nothing, though it was obvious they suspected the Lost Lake House of housing something against Prohibition law. Foolproof—except for the one thing Maurice Vernon never mentioned: that a word from one man who knew the location of the secret entrances and exits could put the police in possession of the whole scheme at a stroke. He never said it because he had full confidence in his ability to choose trustworthy men and see that they stayed that way.
But wasn’t he a little over-confident? That confidence, almost a swagger, was one of Vernon’s defining characteristics. He obviously believed everything he said. But there were some things Maurice Vernon didn’t know, Marshall thought, as he took a ring of keys out of his pocket and inserted one in the lock of the tool shed. He didn’t know how relentlessly Marshall hated his own part in the bootlegging operation. Marshall was past the idea of thinking that Vernon knew and played upon his sense of obligation—Vernon simply regarded him as another good guess and good investment.
Maybe his assurance that the police would never get anything on them was a little precarious too?
That’s only wishful thinking, Marshall told himself. He twisted the boathouse key onto the ring alongside the others, and held them tightly for a minute so the metal bit into his fingers. Wishful thinking. Wishing someone else would blast the Lake House apart so he would be absolved from the responsibility. For as long as he worked here he felt that responsibility as heavily as if he were to blame for the whole thing. But not enough to make him pull free—not enough to keep him from being dragged further down into the bootlegging racket every time he accepted another assignment like today’s.
He collected a pair of garden rakes and flung them down in a wheelbarrow so the tines rattled. Maybe it was Maurice Vernon’s gin his father got somewhere those nights that Marshall came home and found him sunk in sluggish sleep on the couch in the front room. It didn’t matter that his father would manage to get the stuff somewhere else, Prohibition or no Prohibition, if Vernon’s operation were shut down tomorrow—so long as he, Marshall, had a hand in running it, he felt as responsible as if he had brought home the bottle and put it into his father’s hand. You could only be answerable for your own conscience.
Outside, the morning routine of the House was going forward. Sweeping up the rooms and preparing refreshments ahead of time indoors, raking and trimming and maintenance of the paths and electric lights outside; and down below, the distilleries set in motion. The furnace chimneys were disguised in decorative stone, running up boldly through the interior of the House, and only emitted smoke at night or when the groundskeepers and kitchen staff were clearly visible at their innocent tasks around the island.
The gravel path down to the boathouse needed attention: weeds had to be pulled and the stones raked smooth. For a moment before he started work, Marshall paused with the rake in his hands, looking up at the first pale gray wreaths of smoke ascending from the chimneys against the china-blue morning sky. At any moment—any moment he chose—he could end it all himself. He knew the camouflaged doors and the hours of the bootlegging runs…and now he had the boathouse key. He could walk into any police precinct in the city and give them the information that would probably make the chief of police leap from his chair and nearly swallow his cigar, if the chief of police was given to smoking cigars. No decent law-abiding person would ever blame him for splitting on a bootlegger. He would more likely be commended.
He remembered the light, the lifting of anxiety in his mother’s careworn face when he gave her his first week’s wages from the Lake House. “The Lord will provide,” she had said gently, looking at the dingy dollar bills as if they had been delivered straight from heaven. And he had put his arms around her, because he was taller and stronger than she was now and wished that he could always protect her from the worry that had been a part of their lives so long.
She had been saying “The Lord will provide” for all of his eighteen years, and she believed it still. She had always taught him the same. But there were some things his mother didn’t know either, these days. She didn’t know the unboyish streak of cynicism formed in Marshall’s mind by the knowledge that it was Maurice Vernon’s providing and his own willful wrongdoing that was keeping them from the poorhouse. If he told her where the money was coming from—would she really be brave enough to turn it down, and face again the cold uncertainty that had terrified him before?
No—Marshall made the decision as swiftly as he always did when his thoughts reached this point. He would not give her another burden in making the choice…even though there were times when he ached for some sort of comfort or guidance. This was his own affair. He would not burden her with knowing that the son she had worked to raise with so much love and prayer was searing his conscience to keep her and her little ones fed and secure.
The breeze ruffled through the flower-heavy bushes of the garden, their blossoms beginning to fade and drop with the end of summer. Marshall began, slowly, to rake the sloping gravel path, while above him, the smoke from the chimneys, now thick and steady, rose in narrow columns against the sky.
On that same Monday morning Dorothy Perkins was again considering the harassing question of shoes. She had spent Sunday morning trying to keep her feet tucked out of sight under the pew in church so no one, least of all her father beside her, would notice how shabby her good shoes had become. Every time her attention became involved with the sermon, she would realize with a start that she had unconsciously let her feet slip back into view, and had to whisk them away again. This was not the proper way to spend a church service. Before next Sunday came, she would have to do something about it.
Dorothy’s problems loomed huge to her on the scale of her own small life. She never considered the size and scope of the world very much except as it affected her, and from her point of view at this moment, nobody had ever been in such an awful mess as she was. Curled up in a woeful ball on her bed, her cheek resting on her hand, she reviewed it unhappily. She couldn’t keep going to the Lake House in these shoes much longer—as a matter of fact she couldn’t go much of anywhere in them much longer—but if she asked her father for new ones it might bring the wrath of her deception crashing down upon her.
She could always stop going to the Lake House, so as to preserve the shoes a little longer—but no, if she stopped going now Sloop Jackson would think it was because of him. He’d tell the others about what had happened in the hall—her ears burned again—and they would laugh uproariously as they did at everything. The girls who were jealous over Sloop’s paying attention to her would exult, and they would all laugh at her and think she was a baby and a coward.
Dorothy sat up suddenly, surprised at her own thoughts. Why was what the others would think the first thing that came into her head? Wasn’t she more distressed at the thought of losing the dancing, the music and the lights?
She pulled her knees up and folded her arms over them and thought about it, a little disturbed. Would she really want to go back to the Lost Lake House on her own even if she had the new shoes? What had happened to her? Was the charm of forbidden fruit wearing off, or was her conscience just catching up with her? Dorothy squirmed again.
If she had the shoes, and the choice was entirely hers, then…no. Dorothy shook her head. She thought it fiercely: she wouldn’t be laughed at! After the way she had fussed and complained to Kitty about her father’s unfairness and her longing for dancing and excitement, her pride would not let her back down and own that she didn’t like it so well after all. More than anything she could not bear the thought of Sloop Jackson mocking her to his friends out of revenge.
But if her father found out—if she told him, that would qualify as “finding out”—she would be absolved; she could be pitied but not mocked for being kept at home by the force of authority.
That was the way out of both problems, of course. Confess everything, take whatever rebuke or punishment came with it—then she wouldn’t have to worry about the shoes or what her friends thought, and life would be a little simpler. But Dorothy quailed terribly at the thought of her father’s eyes on her, the unbelief and then the reproach with which he would meet her confession. He wouldn’t understand why she had gone; he didn’t know what it was like to feel that Life was slipping away from you and that you would simply burst if you didn’t get to try your wings a little. And the fact that she had ended up dissatisfied with her own transgressions after all would give him one more thing to justly use against her.
But if she confessed, of her own free will, it would be a little better than if he found it out himself…wouldn’t it?
Slowly Dorothy unfolded herself and rose from the bed. She was a little pale and had a wavery feeling in her stomach…but she had to get it over with now. Now, before she had a chance to think about it any more. She shook her hair out of her eyes, tried to straighten her slim shoulders and opened her bedroom door. Holding herself very tense, she went slowly down the carpeted front staircase, crossed the patch of sun shining through the front door’s leaded glass panes onto the hall floor, and went to the library door.
She had been so intent upon her own tenseness and upon not thinking ahead of time what she was going to say that she had not been aware of voices downstairs in the house. At the library door she paused, awakened to recognition that there were several men talking in the room. The polished wooden door stood open just a few inches, and Dorothy moved up close to it, trying to see inside. She could see only a strip of her father’s desk and the knees and shoes of two men sitting in chairs facing it, but she could hear their voices clearly now.
“But don’t you understand how much of this stuff is being moved under our noses while we wait? We could have shut down half the speakeasies in the city by this time.”
“Yes, and it wouldn’t bring us a step nearer to shutting down the supplier. As long as they are in business a dozen new speakeasies will simply spring up somewhere else for every dozen we close, and it’ll only cost the city more time and money to locate and break them up.”
“But do you really believe letting these ones operate will give us a lead? What customer would—”
Dorothy knew that voice of her father’s, straight and level and indicating he had already made up his mind. “As little as any of us likes to admit it, these are hard times for a lot of people in the city. Money is scarce. The reward—”
“Reward!” Dorothy had heard steps clumping about the library, and now knew they belonged to the chief of police, who surged into view by the front of the desk, a tall heavy man with gray hair thinning to baldness. “Perkins, you’ve said you believe Maurice Vernon is behind it all, and that’s what makes the reward business impossible. Vernon can afford to pay well and he knows it. What reason would one of his bootleggers have to throw up a steady paying job for—”
“To get out of an illegal operation that might be shut down at any moment, in exchange for five hundred dollars of certain money—”
“Five hundred!” The exclamation broke from the two seated men simultaneously and nearly shook the room.
“That,” said Dorothy’s father, “is what I intended to propose this afternoon. I partly agree with you; I don’t believe the hundred-dollar reward is tempting enough.”
“But five hundred—under present economic conditions—rate of taxes—salaries—” The two other aldermen were in paroxysms of reaction to the notion of spending.
Alderman Perkins’ voice rose to a steely ring that filled the library. “And just what else can we do? You admit that Vernon has beaten you, that your police force can’t catch his bootleggers in the act of running the stuff. We are powerless: passing hatfuls of new regulations would be as worthless as the paper they were printed on so long as the old ones are broken with impunity.” There was the sound of a heavy chair scraping and Dorothy knew he was on his feet. “Gentlemen, we didn’t enact Prohibition law, and we have been placed at a disadvantage from the beginning in trying to enforce it. But the fact remains: these racketeers are taking advantage of a black-market demand for liquor among the worst elements of society. And we have no choice but to fight it or lose control of our city.”
Dorothy found she had been holding her breath. Involuntarily she leaned forward a little and her shoulder touched the door—it creaked inward an inch.
Her father looked over at the door and saw her, and spoke without a pause or a change in his council-voice. “Yes, what is it?”
“N-nothing,” said Dorothy, coming just a little bit inside the doorway. “I—I just wanted to ask you about something—when you aren’t busy.” Her eyes slipped self-consciously to the faces of the other three men, who had naturally turned to look at her.
“One moment,” said her father. The men turned their attention back to him, and he addressed them again. “Gentlemen, I know we’re agreed on what I have already said. The only question is one of practical policy. If you do not agree with my proposal I don’t see what more I can offer.”
There was a pause. The other two aldermen exchanged several questions and answers in one glance, and then one of them leaned forward in his chair to speak.
“We’ll give it a week,” he said. “That should give the Chief his opportunity…after that, if nothing’s changed, I think it would be advisable to call a full meeting of the Board.”
Alderman Perkins nodded curtly. The committee got up to go, and Dorothy moved aside to let them go through the library door. The first two men smiled briefly and mechanically as they passed her; the chief of police brought up the rear muttering exasperatedly to himself and did not even look at her.
She stood there, feeling very small in the stillness of the library, as she listened to them getting their hats in the hall and leaving by the front door. Her father had sat down at his desk again and was turning over some papers, familiar chisel-carved lines of concentration in his forehead. He had apparently forgotten about her already. Dorothy looked woefully over at the sunlight pouring between the heavy drapes on the library windows, trying to draw something from its shine to bolster her fallen spirits. Her blood had turned at the ring in her father’s voice when he pronounced judgment on “the worst elements of society”—if only the committee knew they had been conducting a meeting in the presence of such an element, that a girl who had been in a speakeasy and tasted the contraband liquor stood back trying to make herself inconspicuous against the library door.
Obviously her father was not going to notice her again unless she said or did something. She went slowly toward the desk and rounded the corner of it so she stood at his right hand. After a moment he glanced up. “What? Oh…yes. One moment, Dorothy.”
He studied the last document in his hand, his dark brows drawn low in concentration. Dorothy looked at him curiously. Something about him had impressed her in that scene with the committee. Perhaps it was the rather grand way he had stood firm on what he thought was right, even though it was likely to bring him more trouble. Dorothy, watching him, wondered suddenly if he ever wanted to taste something of life outside the walls of his library, if he ever grew tired of committees and city regulations…
He laid the papers aside and looked up, turning toward her a little. “What is it?”
For a second—half a second—Dorothy stared into his face, so familiar and yet somehow always strange. It occurred to her for the first time that her father was a handsome man, and that there were more lines around his eyes and in his forehead than she remembered. Ever since Prohibition began he had headed the committee charged with fighting bootlegging in the city; it had lost him sleep and cost the taxpayers money and caused unpleasant arguments at committee meetings. Now was she to confess she had spent the allowance he gave her on admission to the nightclub housing the most notorious speakeasy of all? Dorothy had underestimated all the reasons he had to be angry with her, and how potent that anger might be.
She opened her mouth—somehow kept back a gasp of indecision, and struggled for something else to put in place of the confession.
“It—it wasn’t anything, really,” she said. “I wanted to ask if I—if I could borrow a book from the shelf. The one—Tennyson’s poems.”
“Yes, certainly,” said her father. Dorothy thought she saw a lifting of the lines in his forehead, almost as if he were pleased. He turned in his chair to look at the shelves that lined the wall behind his desk. “I believe it’s near the end, there, on the first shelf.”
Dorothy went over to the bookshelf and slid out the elderly gilt-edged volume with fingers that did not seem to belong to her. Her escape at the edge of the cliff left her almost light-headed. She could not do it, she could not…she could never confess. She sensed her father’s eyes following her, with more approval than he had shown in a while. He had always used to enjoy reading himself. Perhaps he thought she had improved.
Stepping softly over the library carpet—for she did not want to attract his notice any more now—she made her way out of the room, and her heart bobbled again as her father’s voice followed her through the door. “Can you shut the door behind you, Dorothy? I have some telephoning to do.”
With a sense of gratefulness she shut the polished door, then crossed to the staircase and sat down on the bottom stair, the poetry-book on her knees and her spirits wilted again. She would put it off for a week. The committeemen had said the same thing. Perhaps after another week had gone by she could ask him about the shoes, and get away with it. The weeks spun out sickeningly before her…she would go back to the Lake House, again and again…she had no more courage to free herself of that than she had to face her father.