1
HARRY noticed that recently things had been uncharacteristically tense. Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday and Esther was helping Bernard cook a comforting meal, using their mother’s precious recipes passed down the centuries from Stephen Hopkins who was the great-greatgrandfather of Robert Treat Paine, who was the greatgreat-grandfather of Frances Paine Barrington. Hopkins wasn’t just an early settler. He was the early settler. Esther and Bernard brined the turkey, made leek and bacon stuffing, jellied cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, corn and cabbage. They made three different varieties of pie, all Frances Barrington perfections: pumpkin, apple, and cherry, Harry’s personal favorite. The whole day was usually relaxed and pleasant, even if by the end of the evening, Alice’s parents had had a little too much brandy, but this didn’t upset Harry, because they were not mean, just tearfully sentimental, telling him how he was “already” part of their family, and how fond their beloved Alice was of him.
His Uncle Henry would come with his three strapping sons and dutiful and church-mouse-quiet Aunt Ruth. Harry liked his cousins, but had more in common with the mahogany umbrella stand. Until they left, usually blessedly early (because Aunt Ruth was prone to awful migraines, and was it any wonder?), the conversation around the dinner table revolved around nothing but the recounting, in tortuous detail, of the ignominy of losing the annual Regatta race to Yale eleven out of the last thirteen years. Last June was the first time Harvard had won in seven years, and judging from the celebration around Boston you’d think they’d won the Hundred Years War. All the Barringtons had gone down to New Haven for the sacred twenty-minute event and then talked about it non-stop for the next four months—all except Harry who afterward wished only to puncture his eardrums with rusty nails.
Ben and Esther usually played Parcheesi or got Herman and Ellen to make up a foursome for bridge. Ellen drank happily and socially with Herman, engaging him on all manner of lively topics, from the price of paper to the reasons for the decline of civilization, on which they heartily yet agreeably disagreed.
But this Thanksgiving, there didn’t seem to be much of any of that—no maudlin protestations of love from the Porters, no Parcheesi between Ben and Esther, and no relaxed banter between Ellen and Herman. And no Uncle Henry. Aunt Ruth had had a minor stroke and could not venture out in public.
This Thanksgiving, Elmore came instead of Uncle Henry, bringing his own parents and grandparents. Harry would’ve liked to blame the tension on Elmore and his lack of compatibility with his sister, but he suspected the awkwardness of the celebration had little to do with the medical student. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, over Sunday lunch in front of everyone, Esther for some odd reason pressed Harry and Ben on extending a Thanksgiving invitation to their new friends in Lawrence.
“What new friends in Lawrence?” Alice instantly piped in.
“Harry, you haven’t told Alice about your friends from Lawrence?”
“I don’t have any friends from Lawrence.” He stared into his roast potatoes.
“It is custom,” Esther proceeded mildly, “in our country, to welcome newcomers by sharing our holiday table with them. Remember the story of Grandpa Stephen? The Pilgrims and the Indians? He walked off the Mayflower, the first immigrant, if you will, and the Indians didn’t scalp him, no, they gave him corn. That’s the true Thanksgiving tradition. We are the original immigrants, Harry. We feel an affinity with the newcomers. Now we’ve become the natives. But if not the immigrants at the table of the natives, then who?”
“Good question,” said Herman. “Well said, daughter. Who are these people? And will we have the room? Jones? How many are you thinking of inviting, Harry? My brother is not coming, but Elmore is bringing his parents and grandparents.”
“We have a banquet-sized dining room, Father,” said Esther. She seemed to be pressing the point rather humorlessly. “Besides, Elmore is not an immigrant. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite apply to him.”
“Perhaps,” Herman suggested, “you’re taking the Indiannative thing too literally. We don’t actually have to invite the immigrants.”
“I think Ben and Harry might like to.”
Harry saw doomsday up ahead. But Ben, deaf to nuance, lit up. “Why, what a fabulous idea!”
“Ben,” said Harry. “Your mother is coming. She said she might bring your Aunt Josephine.”
“Really?” Herman exclaimed. “Jones, did you hear that? Are you counting?”
“No, sir.” Louis was standing by the door, not paying any attention.
“I’m thrilled your aunt can join us, Ben,” said Herman. “I like her enormously. She’s got so much sense. But now we really won’t have room.” He shrugged, his mouth curling upward in an ironic smile. “We’ll have to set out the immigrant table in our breakfast room. I’m not sure that will be in keeping with the spirit of the holiday though. What do you think, Esther?”
“I’ll invite them regardless,” said Ben, barely able to contain his excitement. “We’ll figure it out.”
The girls had stopped coming on Thursday evenings, so Ben dragged Harry all the way to Summer Street, and called on the Attavianos on a Wednesday evening a week before Thanksgiving. Harry thought it was a terrible idea and said so to an utterly undeterred Ben. “I haven’t seen her in weeks,” Ben said. “I just want to say hello. What if she got in trouble after her train was late?”
“What if?”
Gina was there, but was not allowed to speak, or even permitted to leave her room, though she did come down the stairs and stood, surreptitiously pressed against the landing wall, watching the two young men, with their hats in their hands and their coats still on—not being asked to sit down, not offered a cup of tea. This noticeably deflated Ben. Gina couldn’t tell them what was wrong, though her eyes tried to speak all the things she could not say.
After Ben’s awkward invitation, Mimoo and Salvo stared at him with such hatred and disbelief, as if they had misunderstood and he had come to invite them not to Harry’s house for a feast but to spend eternity in hell.
“Oh, that would be so wonderf—” Gina began from the stairs. At the frontline, Salvo whipped around to shut her up with a glare and then turned to Ben and Harry. “Thank you,” he finally managed to utter. “But unfortunately we won’t be able to make it. We have plans to start our own traditions with our family and friends here in our new home.” Salvo said nothing after that, and even Mimoo, who was usually polite to guests, didn’t invite them to stay for a drink, or have a morsel of the delectable cheesecake that had recently come out of the oven and was cooling on the stove.
Gina was prevented from speaking a word to them, ushered upstairs before she could.
On the train back, Harry was unapologetically caustic. “So I couldn’t tell, would they rather sit down for turkey with you and me, or . . . eat week-old fish? Mulled cider in Barrington or drink a gallon of salt water?”
“Why were they being like that? It’s foolish. It’s not reasonable.”
“Benjamin, you’re smitten with their fifteen-year-old daughter! Who is the one with no sense?”
“I have been nothing but respectful and proper.”
“And foolish.”
“They don’t know how I feel.”
“Oh yes, because you’ve kept it well hidden. Did you see Salvo’s expression? He wanted to strike you dead with the power of his hatred alone. He seemed shocked it wasn’t working.”
Ben tutted, tapping on the darkened window as the hiss and release of steam from the caboose car drowned out his irritated words for a few moments.
“Did you hear what I said?” Ben repeated. “Would you be so unreasonable if I were to inquire after Esther?”
Harry turned to Ben, his gray eyes unblinkingly focused on his friend. “Try me,” he said. “Inquire.”
Ben nodded. “Exactly! Why can’t Salvo be like you?”
“For one I’m not Sicilian. They disembowel you in Italy for dishonoring their females.”
“I’m not dishonoring, I’m honoring!”
“Please. You don’t fool Salvo. You don’t fool me.” Harry wanted to add, you don’t even fool my sister.
“They’re not in Italy now.” Ben took his hat and placed it over his chest, as if he were putting his heart into it. A minute went by in silence. Suddenly Ben said, “You could’ve helped me a little.” His tone was accusing.
“Helped you how? I came with you, didn’t I?”
“You just stood like a pillar and didn’t say a word. You let me drown out there and you didn’t come to my rescue.”
“Did you see the look on their faces? On her face?” Harry said. “She must have gotten into such trouble after the train was late. I was reacting to that. I didn’t know what to say.”
“What have I done?” said Ben. “What do I do?” He looked crestfallen.
“Benjamin, what do you do? Ashley, from Apley Court. She has had her eye on you since Hydrostatics and Integral Calculus. Why do you think she’s taking Dynamics of a Rigid Body?”
“Stop joking. This isn’t funny.”
“Forget the fifteen-year-old. Trust me, there is no future there.”
“I’m not even sure I want a future,” Ben said, turning to stare out the dark window at his mirrored reflection. “Perhaps I would like ten minutes now.”
“And you wonder why Salvo wants you dead.”
2
So here it was, Thanksgiving, and no one was happy. Only Elmore was oblivious to the undercurrents. He spent most of the reception hour regaling Esther with his knowledge of the advances in modern radiology treatments. Harry thought that men who courted women sure had some peculiar ideas about what women found enticing. Esther, while remaining silent, looked like she wanted to poke out her eyes (or his?) with knitting needles. Herman spent the time in the drawing room with Ellen and Josephine Shaw Lowell and the Porters. Josephine looked nothing like Ellen: she was tall, commanding, wore matronly clothes appropriate for a widow, and had her hair parted in the middle and wrapped into a severe bun that pulled the skin of her face back and made her expressionless. She didn’t smile or frown, her skin so taut. She just loomed above her animated petite and round sister, pleasantly dressed and perfumed, nodding at Josephine in reverential agreement. Ben, clearly sick of Harry’s company, endeavored to make Harry sick of his by talking non-stop about Panama. “I will sign any petition,” said Harry, “I will give any amount of money, I will go to any demonstration, if only you will stop.”
“Would you prefer to be over there?” Ben pointed to his mother, on the other side of the room, who was loudly accusing Herman of approving the war with Spain only because he was a man. That paid diminishing returns with Herman who in return demanded of Ellen how she would like her pacifist namby-pamby ideas dismissed solely because she was a woman.
“I want to be like Louis,” said Harry to Ben, pointing to his butler who had walked into the drawing room and now stood like a statue with his hands by his sides. “Blessedly deaf.”
“If only,” Louis said, announcing that dinner was served.
Before they took their first bite of turkey, Herman, who couldn’t let it go, who couldn’t let anything go, asked Harry to give his opinion on the war. And give it Harry did, agreeing with Ellen and Josephine that indeed it was a terrible idea.
There was vocal reprobation around the table. Even Orville came down on Harry, and he usually stayed away from politics. “That’s unbecoming, Harry,” Orville said. “A man has to be for war.”
“That just proves our point!” Ellen exclaimed. “Right, Josephine?”
“I don’t know how I feel about your long-term prospects with my daughter,” Orville continued, “knowing you side with women about matters of war.”
That stopped the conversation like a derailed train. Stopped the clinking of forks, the pouring of drinks. It was as if everything was still for a moment. Aside from the challenging insult, it was a moment in which nearly everyone at the table—Herman, Harry, Esther, a mortified Alice, Orville, Irma, Louis with a serving dish of mashed potatoes, Ellen, Ben and even Josephine—remembered a small detail: Harry had yet to ask for Alice’s hand.
“Um, can you pass the salt, Father,” Harry asked, reaching over. “And the gravy, too, please.”
“Here, darling,” said Alice, handing him the gravy ladle, her hand slightly trembling. “I have one here.” Harry saw it, and gently patted her laced-up forearm, giving her a calming smile, as if to say, don’t worry about a thing, my skin is too thick to care. She visibly relaxed.
Elmore was oblivious to all undercurrents. “Did you know Walter Reed is performing medical experiments in Cuba?” he said, ever the doctor in training. “Inducing yellow fever in dozens of unwilling subjects to prove that mosquitoes carry the plague that’s decimating the tropics. Fortunately none of them have died.”
“The mosquitoes?” said Harry.
“The unwilling subjects,” appended Elmore.
“So far,” said Ellen. “But do you know what thousands have died from? Imperialism.”
“Mother, please,” said Ben. “It’s Thanksgiving dinner.”
“What, people don’t die on Thanksgiving? It’s not a holiday in Puerto Rico, son.”
“Your mother is quite right, Benjamin,” said Josephine. “Eat your turnips.” Josephine still thought of Ben as eleven years old, because that’s how old he was when he stopped living with her.
“Yellow fever and malaria are the scourges of the tropics,” Elmore went on, ignoring the songs of war, beating the disease drum.
“You know what the scourge of the tropics is?” said Ellen. “Imperialism.”
Ben emitted a gurgling sound of throaty frustration.
Leaning to him, Harry lowered his voice. “See, now you know how I feel when you go on ceaselessly about your stupid canal.”
“Mother, stop,” Ben repeated. “Goodness, you’d think it was a Thursday night!”
“Actually it is, son. It’s Thanksgiving.” Everyone laughed and the tension lifted for a moment. “The U.S. forces are down in China,” Ellen said to Ben, “allied against the Chinese who hate foreign intervention.”
“China is not the tropics, Mother.”
“In Cuba we are promising them intervention,” Ellen pressed on, banging the plate with her fork, “to preserve what we call ‘independence.’ That’s just another word for colonialism.”
“No, it isn’t.” That was Herman. “What about our protection of individual liberty?”
“Another name for colonialism.”
“Oh, Ellen, no. Come on.” That was Josephine, the politically active feminist and philanthropist, the purveyor of all things anti-imperialist and even she was saying that Ben’s mother was stepping over the line. Ben glared at his mother from across the table with gleeful satisfaction.
Ellen cheerfully ignored him. “Is there anywhere in the world we won’t go to protect our interests?” she asked, undeterred. “Cuba, Puerto Rico, China, Panama . . .”
“Mother, leave my Panama out of this.”
“Costa Rica . . .”
“Her too.”
“Son, please.”
“Mother, no matter what you think, we are going to sign a treaty with Britain to allow us to build a canal in Panama.”
“That treaty will never happen,” said Ellen and Elmore in unison. Ellen had found a lone supporter in the mosquito expert! It was a devil’s alliance. Harry stayed out of it.
“Oh, I assure you,” Herman intervened. “That treaty will happen. Your son is entirely correct, Ellen. I know this for a fact, because a fine man and a very good friend of mine, Secretary of State John Hay, has been negotiating that treaty.”
“Imperialism—naked and unabashed!”
“Mother, but the language of the treaty is explicit,” Ben said. “The canal will be neutral and free to all nations. Just like the Suez.”
Ellen showed supreme indifference to Ben’s “facts.” “So we build it, we use our money and then you think we will just allow anyone to pass through it? It will never happen.”
“Your mother is right,” said Elmore. “Sorry, Mr. Barrington. Congress will never ratify that treaty.”
Ben chafed most when forced to reply to Esther’s unsuitable suitor. “They will ratify,” said Ben, “because the whole world will benefit.”
“But none more so than America, right?” Ellen said.
“Does that make you unhappy, Ellen, my friend?” Herman asked. “Is there something wrong with our country benefiting from its honest labor?”
“We don’t need it,” Ellen said adamantly. “We don’t need bananas. We don’t need tea from China. We don’t need sugar from Cuba. We don’t need any of these things.”
The table was quiet as they digested their pies and breads and swallowed their tea.
“Tell me again, Mother, why our business interests in Costa Rica must be cut off,” said Ben. “But do have another bite of fried plantain first.”
“Ellen, have you been in contact with Eugene Debs?” Herman asked. “He thinks like you.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “He is coming to speak at our next week’s meeting. Will you be joining us, Herman?”
Herman smiled benevolently. “I’m having lunch at the Porcellian Club with Mr. Wendell Holmes,” he said. “But thank you. Perhaps Harry will attend. Seems right up his alley.”
“No, no, Harry is coming to a charity ball with me next Thursday,” said Alice, with a fiery gaze at her mother.
Harry touched her hand as he reached for a white napkin. “You know, Herman, it would behoove you to come,” said Ellen. “So many women come to our meetings. Even young girls who are quite interested in progressive ideas.” Ellen smiled. “They might not grow up to be bankers and merchants like you, but then they also won’t go to war . . .”
“Like Uncle Robert, Mother?” Ben asked sharply.
Herman laughed. “Your son has a point, Ellen. To rail against war when your own brother was martyred in one seems unsuitable somehow.”
“No,” she said staunchly. “I rail against unjust war.”
“There was a lot of protest against our Civil War also,” Herman reminded her. “A president lost his life because of it.”
The table became a little quieter.
“I don’t know what that war has to do with what we’re talking about here,” Ellen said. “The right to keep within our own borders.” She turned her gaze back to her son. “Have you asked your young friends what they think of your Panama Canal? Perhaps they can go to Panama with you.”
“Perhaps they might.”
“The tall one especially. Variety, is that her name?”
“Verity,” Ben corrected.
“Right. She is enormously talented. Grasps concepts quickly, is fascinated by every speaker we have—and has her heart in the right place. The other one . . .” Ellen shrugged, kept going. “Frankly I don’t have much hope for her. She has a vacant look about her, as if she understands nothing.”
“She doesn’t speak English well, Ellen,” said Harry.
“Oh, she speaks just fine. Why does she come then?”
“Who are we talking about?” asked Alice.
Ben looked down into his sweet potatoes and corn.
“Just some ladies who come to the meetings on Thursdays. Though I haven’t seen them in a while. Perhaps they lost interest?”
“Perhaps.” Ben didn’t look at his mother.
“They’re funny birds, those two,” Ellen went on. “Even the indifferent one. Do you remember her trying to quote from John Quincy Adams?” She laughed in mockery. “I never heard anyone mangle Adams quite so. She was trying to reproduce his anti-imperialism quote. Oh, how she butchered it. ‘Doctor’ instead of ‘dictator’ indeed!”
Harry and Ben exchanged a darkening quizzical look, as if both were surprised that a seemingly innocent conversation could suddenly get so churlish.
“Give the girl a break, Ellen,” said Harry who saw that Ben couldn’t say the things he was thinking of saying to his mother. “You should be pleased that at least it was an anti-imperialism quote.”
“I can’t understand why she comes, that’s all.”
“Well, she’s not coming anymore, is she, Mother?” Ben said, throwing down his napkin onto his half-empty plate and standing up. “Thank you for dinner, Mr. Barrington. Happy Thanksgiving, sir. But we’re late. Aunt Effie has been invited to the Cabots in Beacon Hill for seven-thirty, and it’s well past.”
They left soon thereafter, and Elmore left too, with his family. No one stayed for after-supper brandy in the library, not even the Porters, who feigned exhaustion before hastily departing. Herman thanked Louis for a lovely meal and went to bed. Only Harry and Esther remained in the library, nursing their drinks and their small sharp wounds.
“Alice is so fond of you, Harry.”
“And I of her.”
“So why don’t you ask the girl to marry you? Make an honest woman out of her.”
“Where’s the fire? I haven’t graduated. I don’t know what I’m doing. Alice’s father should never have said that. It just made poor Alice uncomfortable.”
“Why do parents never fail to embarrass their children?”
“I don’t know.”
“He had too much to drink.”
“An hour into the evening?”
“He didn’t mean it. But what do you mean, you don’t know what you’re doing? What do you see as your options? Going to Costa Rica with Ben to grow bananas?” Esther gave a small scornful chuckle.
They sipped their cordials. The fire was lit. It was quiet.
“Do you want to marry Alice?”
“The question is, dear sister, does Alice want to marry me?”
“Who wouldn’t?” she said, taking her brother’s hand for a moment.
“Don’t be a silly goose. Who wouldn’t? Most of the respectable girls in Boston, that’s who. All I do is read and think. And drink. You think that’s appealing to beautiful society girls like Alice?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. And then, even more quietly, “But what about the non-respectable girls?”
He glanced at her, frowning. “I don’t know any of those, do I?”
“No?”
“What are you talking about, Esther?”
She said nothing. “Why are you so oblivious?” she whispered.
“To what?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing, I said.”
He let his drink go, but not the subject matter. “Everybody’s oblivious, Esther. Have you noticed? No one sees what’s under his very nose.”
She assented with the deepest of sighs. Usually they stopped speaking here, stopping just short of confessions, of intimacies. But tonight was quiet and the fire was still going, gradually burning out, the evening didn’t seem as long as the years in between, and so Esther poured her and Harry another brandy cordial and sat back down by his side. She eyed him, appraised him, delighted in him for a moment, touching his tousled head with affection. Then she spoke after the liquor had warmed her throat and made it easier for her to say what she had never said. “He doesn’t see me,” she said so quietly as if almost to herself, “because he doesn’t love me.”
Harry chewed his lip. “He is just oblivious, Esther. All he thinks about is bananas.”
“Are you saying it because you want to ease my heartache or because you’re defending your friend?”
Harry thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She nodded. “Of course you don’t. I’ll tell you. He’s oblivious because I’m invisible to him. I know this to be true.”
“He doesn’t know how you feel. You’re three years older. You’ve known him since we were kids. He thinks you’re his sister too.”
“But I’m not.”
“So hint to him how you feel.”
“If he knew I’d never see him again. He would stop coming.”
“He grew up with you, Esther. He can’t look at you any other way. You’re my sister. It’s wrong.”
She shook her head. “It’s wrong only because he doesn’t feel it.”
Harry said nothing.
Esther lowered her voice a notch further. “But one of these days, Harry, you might want to tell your closest friend the truth. Let him down gently, the way you’ve let me down gently, and Father, and Mother, and everyone else who’s known you, tell him in your inimitable delicate detached way, Harry, that she doesn’t see him either, that she is oblivious to him for the same reason he doesn’t see me.”
“Who?” said Harry, but even as he spoke, cold color came to his face. He looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“No.”
They sat. She spoke again. “You know who that girl is not oblivious to, though?”
Harry jumped up. He spilled his drink.
“Eventually, do you think you, Harold Barrington, could let Ben know if you’re oblivious to her?”
“I really have no earthly idea what you’re talking about. But it’s getting late, Esther. I’m quite tired. Good night. Happy Thanksgiving.”
He was about to leave the library. “Are you coming up?”
“I’ll sit here for a little while and finish my drink. Good night.” She turned away.
Soon 1899 became 1900.