If he had stopped to think about it, Jamie most likely would have figured out what would eventually come to pass. It was inevitable, as inevitable as spring following winter. But he was very busy that spring of 1901, busier than he had ever been in his life. He never did stop to think about it. It sneaked up on him as so many things in his life had.
It was Sunday afternoon and he arrived in his new carriage to take Sunday dinner with the Hesses, which was, of course, the same intolerable routine that was followed every Sunday afternoon. As always, dinner would be served precisely at one, or at the very latest five minutes past the hour. The time didn’t vary and the menu, barely. On the sideboard would be the invariable two pitchers of milk and water. On the large silver serving platter would be one of the three meat courses, which were served on a rotating basis—lamb (in the form of thin chops or a roast leg); roast chicken (always between five and six pounds); or a roast fresh ham. Why, deep in the heart of Texas, there never was a cut of beef was beyond Jamie’s understanding. Then after dinner, the Hesses were off and Anne and he would copulate, usually in her blue and white chaste bedroom.
But that Sunday afternoon, the usual was not to be.
Anna, the servant woman, admitted him, took his hat. Then, thin, disapproving lips barely moving, she told him that the Hesses awaited him in the parlor. Mrs. Hess, sitting stiffly upright in one of the dark red overstuffed chairs, wore her habitual frown. Karl Hess, pacing back and forth, seemed angry, particularly forbidding. Anne was crumpled on the sofa, crying softly. Seeing him, Karl Hess pointed a thick finger: “There you are, you rotter! You scoundrel! You ungrateful snake in the grass! I took you in, into my business and into my home, treated you like a son, and how did you repay me? By ruining our innocent little girl, by taking advantage of her!”
Jamie cast a quick look at Anne, sobbing louder now. She’s betrayed us, me, by telling them! He was furious with her. God, but she was a sniveling bitch! First she had tricked him into fucking her and now she had informed on him! Or had the Hesses just guessed what was going on and forced an admission from her? Well, they were more to blame than he. Right from the start they had thrown the two of them together. They’ve been pushing her at me! They’ve left us alone on purpose! What did they expect to happen?
But he knew the answer to that. They had expected him to fall in love with her, or at least to stoke his greed sufficiently for him to propose marriage. But their plan had gone awry. Instead of his proposing, their virtuous little girl had seduced him.
He wanted to shout that she was ten years older than he and hardly the little innocent they thought she was. But how could he do that? Especially in the face of Karl Hess’s formidable wrath? For one, he’d look like a terrible fool and second, he’d be compounding his supposed sin by sounding like an unchivalrous bastard.
Then the solution came to him. He’d apologize to them all. He’d beg their forgiveness on his knees. He’d swear that if they found it in their hearts to forgive him, he’d never darken their home again. At the same time, he would try to atone for the unforgivable by working his fingers to the bone for them. He would promise to break his back in the service of their business. It went without saying that he would never attempt to see Anne again. He’d say that he didn’t deserve to see her again; that he wasn’t fit even to clean her shoes much less kiss her feet. Then, they, with true Christian charity, would forgive him and allow him to remain in the salvage business. At the same time he would be spared Anne’s bovine presence forever! That alone would be worth everything! Even the groveling . . .
Even as Jamie was working himself up to utter those degrading but ultimately rewarding words, he heard Karl Hess say, “And now that Anne is pregnant with your child, you’re going to do the right thing by her or by God, I’ll have you horsewhipped right in the middle of Broadway! I’ll have you tarred and feathered! I’ll make you wish you were never born! I’ll destroy you!”
Jamie, his face white as the proverbial sheet, stiffly informed Mr. Hess that it wasn’t necessary to threaten him, especially since he wasn’t frightened by threats and was prepared to do the right thing by a pregnant Anne. He would never even think to do otherwise. That in spite of what Mr. Hess thought of him, James Markson was a man of honor.
The moment he said this, Mr. Hess’s furious scowl vanished, although Mrs. Hess’s grimace did not. Immediately Hess rushed over to him and seized his hand and pumped it vigorously. “Of course you’re a man of honor. I always knew it was so. If I had thought otherwise, would I have treated you like a son in the first place? Of course not! It was just that I was so overwrought to discover that you two naughty children couldn’t wait, that your passion for each other was so overwhelming, so powerful that you—”
Mrs. Hess coughed and her husband caught himself up quickly. He took out a white handkerchief and blew his nose. “That you two were so much in love that you forgot yourselves . . .”
He turned around to look at Anne, nodded to her. She quickly sat up, her hand flying to her mouth, covering it in her disbelief over her own all-consuming happiness. She rushed across the room and threw her arms around her betrothed.
“It will be so wonderful, Jamie! You and me and our—” She buried her face in his shoulder. As he stood there unmoving, Hess urged him, “It’s all right, my boy, you may kiss her. I know you want to. It’s all right. Now,” he checked his watch, “shall we go into dinner? And we’ll plan the wedding. Shall we say next week? Since Anne is preg—”
Mrs. Hess, rising to lead the way into the dining room, coughed again.
“Under the circumstances,” Karl Hess corrected himself, “we shouldn’t delay too long. We’ll have to check with Reverend Hubert about having the wedding at the church as soon as possible—”
Church wedding? No, it was impossible! Church ritual? No! A tide of nausea rose up within him. He had visions of religious processions, processions he had forgotten. Peasants walking through the streets, an air of unreality. There had been a kind of hysteria, always a hint of anti-Semitism suffusing the sweet spring day. And then there was “Green Thursday.” How could any Jew who had witnessed a “Green Thursday” forget it? That day when a convert, that Jewish infidel, carried a statue of Jesus at the head of the procession. He would be getting married on a Sunday but for him it would be “Green Thursday” just the same.
But what of it? he demanded of himself. What did it matter to him anyway? He no longer was Yitzhak Markoff, son of David and Eve Markoff, a Jew . . .
As Karl Hess carved the leg of lamb, he told Jamie that he was presenting him with another five-percent interest in the junkyard.
“No, sir,” Jamie protested. “I don’t want it. I won’t accept it, not for doing the only honorable thing.” A convert yes, a whore—no!
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, that he was only acting out of honor, he realized that they were less than adequate words, and he tried again. “I can’t accept a gift for doing what is not only correct, but my privilege, my pleasure.” He didn’t look at Anne as he spoke. He hadn’t looked at her since she had rushed across the parlor to embrace him. Now, he forced himself to look at her and smile. He was going to have to get used to looking at her constantly, for the rest of his life. She was going to be the mother of his child, and a child—well, a child was a precious obligation.
“Very well put, Jamie my son. But I insist you have another five percent. After all, it’s all in the family now, Jamie . . .” It was the first time Karl Hess had called him by his first name. It was the start of a new era.
Then the prospective father-in-law proposed a toast to the happy couple, to their future. The only thing to toast with was the milk, slightly off in flavor. Drinking it down, Jamie’s stomach turned over. To his future? Maybe it was as sour as the milk.
Two weeks later, they were married in Galveston’s Methodist Church, with a Champagne and wedding cake reception at the bride’s home. The groom seemed somewhat preoccupied. The wedding guests laid that to a new husband’s nervousness at what followed the ceremony—the honeymoon. Mr. Hess had, as a matter of fact, proposed to send the couple on a honeymoon to St. Louis, but the groom had declined. He had much too much to do. They were experiencing some engineering difficulties with the seawall. He couldn’t, in all good conscience, leave at this time.
The truth was he couldn’t contemplate spending that much time alone with his bride. So, instead of leaving on a honeymoon after the reception was over, Jamie transported his belongings from his boarding house to the Hess home. Karl—Jamie had been asked to call him that—insisted that, for the time being anyway, Jamie and Anne make their home with them. So it was in Anne’s white bed in the blue and white room that Jamie spent his first night as a husband, dreaming not of his bride nor even of his unborn child, but of a procession, a parade and not with a convert holding a statue of Jesus marching in front, but two women, dressed as clowns, leading off the march. One was red haired, and one had black hair, black as the night.
Two months later. A Monday morning, ten past eleven. The phone jangled in the office of the junkyard. Before removing the receiver, Karl Hess glanced quickly over at his son-in-law who was concentrating on a ledger. After listening for a couple of minutes, Karl hung up and said, “We have to go home, my boy.”
Jamie looked up surprised. Go home in the middle of the day? That had never happened before.
“It’s bad news, I’m afraid. Anne . . . She’s lost the baby.”
They went upstairs to the girlish blue and white bedroom Jamie and Anne shared. Anna the maid followed them, agitated; she was like one of the family. Anne was lying in bed, propped up by a mound of white pillows. She was covered by a pretty quilt, white with small blue flowers sprinkled here and there. Her face was pale and she was sobbing—rhythmic, dry little sobs. To the left of the bed stood her mother, lips compressed, hands folded in front of her. Before Jamie could go to his wife to kiss her forehead, glistening with little beads of perspiration, murmur his few words of consolation and inquire how she felt, his father-in-law did these things then took up a position on the right side of the bed. He smiled at Jamie, a small, sad little smile of commiseration, as Anne lowered her eyes, stretching out a hand to him, almost beseechingly. Her arm was covered by the long sleeve of a white nightgown. Jamie’s eyes moved to his mother-in-law. She wasn’t smiling Karl’s sad little smile but her eyes were intent on him all the same. Even as the little hairs on the back of his neck rose, Jamie spun around to see what Anna was doing. She was caught in the doorway, wringing her hands. A little chill coursed through him; he felt as if he were up on the stage of the Beach Pavilion, part of one of those tableaux they held there last summer before the Pavilion was washed away. He broke out in a sweat (summer had come early to Galveston that year); the room was very hot and quiet, silent except for Anne’s dry little hard sobs. It came to him that a vital character of the tableau was missing.
“Where’s the doctor?” he asked quietly. “Didn’t you call him?”
Mrs. Hess looked at her husband. “Yes, of course. Dr. Hubbard, my doctor.” She shrugged. “He could do nothing.”
Jamie moved quickly now to the bed. Anne looked up at him with her habitual half smile, her soft, cowlike blue eyes. He pulled the quilt from her body, threw it on the floor. She lay there cowering in her high-necked nightgown, white and pristine, on the pure-white, pristine sheets. Jamie pulled up the long nightgown in one swift motion. Even Anne’s body was white and pure, no bloodied rag between her thighs! Her thin high-pitched shriek rent the room.
“You forgot one thing,” Jamie said. “You forgot that though I’m young and gullible, I was a country boy, a dealer in livestock, used to the ways of animals.”
“What are you going to do?” Karl Hess asked him.
Jamie laughed bitterly. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
“You’re not going to be so foolish as to walk out on ten percent of a business?” It was more statement than question .
“Aren’t I? What the hell does your stinking ten percent mean to me, anyway? I have no say in the business. I don’t get any money out of it except for the few stinking dollars you throw me by way of a salary. I live here in this stinking house where the windows are never open, where there isn’t a fucking drop of anything to drink except for your stinking milk, where I can’t even breathe. Not to mention that I have to fuck your stinking, lying bitch of a daughter whom I can’t stand the sight of—”
When he saw Karl Hess wince, he decided to go on. He wanted to wound the son-of-a-bitch liar who had snared him for his daughter just as wild animals were snared—through trickery and deceit, duping him as if he were the world’s biggest fool.
“No wonder you had to trick me into marrying her after you had thrown her at me for months. Nobody else wanted her because she’s so repulsive and she had to get married quick before she was really too old to have babies.”
“That’s not so,” Hess protested. “She’s not old. She’s not repulsive.”
“It made me sick to fuck her—”
Karl Hess staggered, held up a hand as if to ward off Jamie’s repugnant words.
“No wonder she attacked me every night. She was desperate to make love, desperate to get pregnant so that I wouldn’t find out she was such a stinking liar, besides being old and ugly.”
“I refuse to have you talking about Anne this way—”
“Who cares what you want, you stinking hypocrite? Anyhow, it’s the truth. Don’t you like the truth, you stinking, lying holier-than-thou hypocrite?” His mouth curled into a sneer and his eyes lit with malice. “I thought you Christians like the truth better than we Jews! How do you like that, Karl Hess? It was a Jew you were so hot to get for your daughter. It was a Jew whom you were pissing in your pants for. It was a Jew whom you wanted to fuck your daughter! That’s right! You knew my name was von Marx. before it was James Markson. What you didn’t know was that it was Markoff before it was Wilhelm von Marx. I’m no German! I’m a Russian-born Jew!”
To Jamie’s amazement, Karl Hess didn’t blink an eye. In fact, he seemed to regain some of his composure, even his usual arrogance. “But not much of a Jew, I’d say, Mr. James Markson. A geshmott Jew, a turncoat, is more like it, wouldn’t you say?” Now he laughed at the expression on Jamie’s face. “Did you really think I didn’t know the difference between a German accent and a Yiddish one? I knew what you were immediately. I came from Germany when I was already twenty. Germany’s full of Jews. All kinds. Orthodox ones, assimilated ones who consider themselves Jews culturally but are practically nonobservants. And we also have the converts who embrace Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Like my mother.”
“Your mother?” Jamie was incredulous. “Then you’re Jewish!”
“No, Mr. Markson, unlike you, I was never Jewish. My mother’s conversion came before she married my father. I was a Christian from the day I was born.”
He said this so smugly, so arrogantly that Jamie wanted to hit him. He ached to hit him. Instead he said, “We had a saying about converts in Slobodka. ‘He who’s a convert is neither a Jew nor a gentile.’ But since you pretend to be such a good, American-German Christian, and you say you knew I was Jewish, what the hell did you want with me? Why did you want me so much you had to trap me? Was it that you loved the Jewish blood in your veins so much you wanted more of it for your grandchildren?”
Karl Hess felt strong again, no longer on the defensive. On the contrary, he felt now that he was going to win this battle. He raised an amused eyebrow. “No, I neither love it or hate it, unlike some full-blooded Jews I could name. You had a saying in Slobodka; well, we had one in Germany. ‘No one makes a better German than a Jew.’ Maybe that’s why a Jew is more accepted in Germany than anywhere else in the world. Accepted and respected for his special qualities, of which there are quite a few—love of education, love of family, and a special knack for business, an ability with money.”
“But why me? Why were you so obsessed with getting me that you had to lie and use trickery?”
“I’m a careful man, Mr. Markson, a thorough man. While you may scorn my daughter, don’t you think for a second there weren’t other men who would have been happy to have her and what goes with her. No, I chose you. You were the correct combination of those qualities I wanted to see reproduced in my grandchildren. Perhaps it was the German in me that wanted your physical perfection, your strength and your power, your beauty of face and physique. Strangely enough, you have the ideal Nordic looks we Germans admire. But I’m more American, I hope, than German. I’ve lived in this country for forty years. As an American, I wanted your courage and heroism, the fearlessness you displayed in the hurricane. And as a businessman with an eye for the future, eager to establish a dynasty if you will, I saw something in you that you didn’t even see in yourself. What kind of man, do you think, fights to save lives one day and goes about collecting the wreckage of the disaster that imperiled those lives the next day? I’d say a born business man with foresight, a man who sees a need and a source and strives to connect the two. To be part of the future a man needs a combination of common sense and imagination.
“As for you having been a Jew, that was all to the good. As a father, I thought of another saying we had in Germany— ‘Jewish men make the best husbands.’ They’re industrious, good providers and faithful. And they love their children. No, there’s nothing wrong with Jewish blood, if you don’t go around proclaiming it. And you weren’t proclaiming it, obviously. For your own reasons, which don’t interest me. In the final analysis, I know that the best thing to be in the whole wide world is a rich, white Protestant American male, preferably of Anglo-Saxon heritage. And you can be that man. I think what you object to most strenuously in our whole sad affair is that you think you were made a fool of. Well, I say to you now: Don’t be a fool! Don’t walk away from what’s within your grasp! James Markson, you can have it all! It’s a new century in a still new country. And Texas is only in its infancy. We can still build together! Stay with Anne! Have children! What is only a salvage business today can be Hess and Markson Enterprises tomorrow. Stay, and the limits are only those you impose on yourself!”
Jamie was studying his father-in-law’s face. He thinks he has me! He watched Hess pull his watch out from his fob pocket, a creature of habit, constantly caught up in the passage of time.
Yes, check your watch, you old bastard. Your time is running out.
“I’m going to give you another ten percent of the business.”
“The hell you are. You’re going to give me another forty percent.”
“Then, you’ll have fifty percent altogether.”
“Obviously.”
“You want too much.”
“Under the circumstances, I don’t think so.”
“It’s too much. You’re being vengeful,” Karl Hess accused.
Jamie laughed. “Of course I am. What did you expect? I’m also being greedy. But you can’t complain. You were the one who laid down the rules.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Trust me to do what? Or, not to do what? You can’t really. We’ll have a contract as we did last time but we’ll still have to take each other on faith.” He laughed again.
“I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you another fifteen percent so you’ll have twenty-five altogether. And I’ll give Anne the additional twenty-five percent.”
“No.”
“Why not? That’s fair. She’s my daughter. Why not?”
“You said it. It’s because she’s your daughter.” He knew about daughters and fathers. In the end, the daughters always sided with their fathers. “But I do think you should give Anne something. What I have in mind is the Villa at 24th on Broadway.”
“You mean that Italian palace?” He was outraged.
“It’s just a villa. It only looks like a palace. It’s for sale and I think Anne should have it.”
“It must cost a fortune!”
“So what? You have a fortune, I’m sure. Salted away that you’ll never spend.”
“It’s ostentatious and vulgar.”
“I like it and Anne will love it. I get the additional forty percent and Anne gets the villa.”
“Or—?”
“Or I disappear from sight. You’ll never find me and Anne will have to wait years to get a divorce. By that time, nobody will want her. She’d certainly be too old to have children.”
They sat in silence until Jamie went up to his father-in-law and took his pocket watch from his vest pocket. Looking at it, he said, “You have five minutes to decide whether it’s yes or no. In five minutes my share goes up to fifty-five percent.”
“You’re a real bastard.”
“You chose me, remember? You have four-and-a-half minutes.”
“You win, Markson. Because I love my daughter. But I have to know that you’ll be good to her.”
Jamie smiled again, savoring his advantage. “Some things you have to take on faith.”
“How do I know there’ll be children?”
“Oh, there will be. I forgot to tell you another stipulation of our agreement. You’re going to designate another twenty-five percent to Anne’s and my firstborn child.”
“You’re insane.”
Jamie said nothing, waited. Karl Hess was a man who understood about choices. Finally he said, “That will leave me with only twenty-five percent of my own business.”
Jamie saw no need to respond to that statement of fact. He and his father-in-law both knew how to add and subtract. “Are there any more stipulations I should know about?” Hess asked. He seemed no longer angry but resigned.
“As a matter of fact, there is one more. I want a letter from you attesting to what you told me about your mother. That she was a convert from Judaism.”
“You are crazy! I absolutely refuse! Why would you want such a document?”
“I give you my word that I won’t use it against you. I want it for—let’s say, an emergency situation.”
“What kind of emergency? To hold over Anne’s head?”
“No, not Anne’s. Mrs. Hess’s. She doesn’t like me. Never has. Just in case you should die before my first child is born, she’d be holding fifty percent of the business and that could be a problem. She could even sell her share to a stranger. You can see how difficult it would be for me to have to operate with another partner, a stranger, who didn’t value me the way my father-in-law would.” Jamie smiled thinly. “But, as I said, I won’t use it against either you or her. It’s just a safeguard. Don’t look so worried. You’ll have your fifty percent until that first child is born.”
Hess’s mouth twisted in ironic reflection. “And what about the second child? Don’t you want me to give my remaining twenty-five percent to your second child?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to take away your incentive for living. I’ll take care of the second child myself, and the third. You can count on it.”
But of course only he knew there’d never be a second child or a third.
He told Selena Janus that he was through with the speech lessons.
“You don’t speak as perfectly as you think you do. My ear still detects a flaw here and there.”
“Not everybody has your ear . . . And if I were too perfect, no one would quite believe me either. People don’t trust perfection.”
“It’s that you think you don’t need me anymore.”
“You’re right.”
“How am I right? That you think you don’t need me or that you really don’t need me?”
“Both.”
She gave him a sour smile. “You used me . . .”
“Just as you used me. Everybody uses everybody else. That is something I just recently learned. Only I don’t want to be used anymore. I don’t intend to be, ever again.”
“So that’s why you’re leaving me? Because you don’t want to be used?”
“Maybe. Does it matter? Maybe it’s just that you don’t have anything I want.”
“God, but you’re a prick!”
He laughed. She had enunciated the word so exquisitely, she made it sound like a beautiful thing to be.
His laughter infuriated her, drove her to utter other words she didn’t ordinarily employ. “Bastard! Son-of-a-bitch!”
Now, he thought, she was both right and wrong. He had a very real, legitimate father, so she was wrong on that score. But she was right about his mother. Didn’t a bitch love and nurture her whelp at first then cast it aside so that in a year’s time, the bitch didn’t even recognize her own offspring, didn’t even know him from all the others?
Jamie and his father-in-law signed the papers in the offices of Hess and Markson Enterprises in the presence of two lawyers, one representing each partner. Karl Hess behaved in a proper, mannerly fashion—the result of many years of self-discipline and tight control. Jamie admired him for that, although he noticed that, for once, the black shoes were not quite as shiny as usual and the gold pocket watch and chain were missing. Was he beginning to unravel? Jamie wondered.
After they were through with the papers and the two lawyers had gone, Karl announced that he was joining a few friends for lunch at the Commerce Club and didn’t know when he would be back. Since he now had a full and equal partner who was both young and energetic, he, Karl, could begin to enjoy a more leisurely pace.
Jamie smiled and nodded although he wasn’t quite sure how to take his father-in-law’s announcement. Then, just before he went through the door, almost as an afterthought, Karl pulled his gold watch and chain out of his coat pocket and deposited the watch on his son-in-law’s mahogany desk, rattling the chain as he did so. “There you go, my son. Now you have everything! Now you’re the keeper of the time.”
Jamie was thoughtful after he left. He had vowed to himself that nothing was ever going to surprise him again, that he’d be prepared for anything, but now Karl Hess had just surprised him. He had never suspected that his father-in-law had a sense of humor.