THE APPOMATTOX, a fashionable new bar on Broadway and Fourteenth Street, was a favorite haunt of Selby's. He liked to stand at the long black mahogany counter and consume gin and oysters for half an hour before making his appearance at a dinner party. Sometimes he would fall into conversation with his neighbor; sometimes he would simply savor the sting of the dry liquor in his throat and contemplate the big painting behind the blue-frocked bartenders that depicted a Roman banquet in high decadence, with brown-limbed young men sprawled on divans drinking from golden goblets and talking to ivory-skinned, scantily clad young women. On the central divans, like an isolated goddess, was a splendid nude with a faraway gaze, presumably dreaming of an absent god. Selby found that he needed the Appomattox to anaesthetize himself against the fashionable New York dinner, but that, so prepared, he could almost enjoy even the most inane conversation.
On a freezing night that threatened snow he visited the bar before a party to be given by his aunt, Lily Van Rensselaer, promising himself a double gin as a bracer for that occasion. At midnight he was to take the Erie sleeper for Buffalo, which gave him a pleasant sense of mild, uninterrupted adventure. But he was startled to recognize the tall figure of his older brother at the bar. It was not like Fred to be drinking alone.
"I thought you might be here," Fred growled as Selby took his stand beside him and picked up the iced gin that the bartender had poured as soon as he had spotted him in the doorway.
"Are you too going to Aunt Lily's?"
"God no! That's one thing I've been spared today."
"What's happened? Have you had a row with Ellie?"
Fred looked surprised at so prompt an attribution of a romantic cause to his trouble. "No. Though that may be coming, too. I've had a bitch of a row with her father."
"Has he sacked you?"
"Or did I quit? I'm not sure which."
Selby whistled. "Things have been happening. But don't worry. Ellie will forgive you a little thing like that."
"How do you know that?"
Selby reflected that it might not be wise, even now, to tell Fred how strongly Ellie felt about her father. "Because she loves you for yourself, poor girl."
Fred grunted. "Well, my poor self may be all the poor girl's going to get. If she still wants it." He picked up his glass and swallowed a gulp of whiskey.
"Don't keep me on pins and needles, man! What's happened?"
Fred seemed to consider for a moment how best to put it. "Well, supposing, when Grant and Lee had met in that Court House for which this bar is named, they'd mapped out an armistice to suit themselves? Suppose, in return for a ceasefire, Grant had authorized the continuance, for some period of time, of slavery in the South? Wouldn't we have felt awfully sold?"
"Well, that's exactly how I felt when I saw and heard the drawing up of an armistice this morning between Mr. Vanderbilt and those two scoundrels, Gould and Fisk!"
"You mean the Commodore gave in?"
"I mean the Commodore compromised. Peace was made. The crooks will keep Erie, but they will have to take back their watered stock. At the prices the old man paid for it."
Selby shrugged. "So we're just back where we started. Is that the end of the world?"
"But it's a betrayal of every basic decency, don't you see, Selby?" Fred's face was drawn, and his eyes actually glittered. "Erie's been an open scandal for years. A road plucked to bits by ravens. The Commodore was going to clean it up and add it to his great network. It was going to be the brightest jewel in his crown! Does that sort of thing mean nothing to you?"
"To me! What have I to do with it?" But seeing Fred's bewildered look, he relented. "All right, tell me about it."
"Daniel Drew was the first to break. He's a fish out of water if he leaves Manhattan. So he came whimpering back and threw himself on Vanderbilt's mercy. Promised him this and that. Anything. He was perfectly happy, of course, to rat on his colleagues."
"But, surely the Commodore didn't trust him!"
"No, but Vanderbilt likes to see men on their knees. He sent word to the others that he was willing to listen, and they came right over, bright and early, the next morning. They went to Vanderbilt's house in Washington Place and barged into his bedroom while the old boy was still dressing. When I arrived for the day's stock market instructions, they were at it, hammer and tongs. You should have seen it, Selby! The old Commodore sitting on his bed, half-dressed, his white mane still mussed from the pillow, one shoe on and one shoe off, and Gould, his hands in his pockets, a little sardonic grin on his foxy face, and Fisk, puffing a big black cigar, cocky as the devil, striding about the room, laying down conditions and making insulting remarks! But do you know something? In that crowd they don't mind insults. Even old Vanderbilt chortled at some crack Fisk took at him. I had the sudden feeling that everyone in that room understood everyone else. Everyone but me!"
"You don't talk their language, Fred," Selby murmured ruefully. "And it's to your credit that you don't."
"Well, it didn't take them long to come to terms. All the Commodore seemed to care about was unloading the bogus stock he'd had to buy. Then I was sent off to round up Frank Work and Bristow and the other brokers, and Vanderbilt's lawyers, of course, and by the time I got back, the three of them had agreed on the terms of their unholy alliance. I tell you, Selby, it nauseated me!"
"And did you tell them so?"
"Not in so many words. But I told Mr. Vanderbilt that if he did business with crooks, he was no better than a crook himself."
"I see. And how did he take that?"
"Oh, he didn't really care. He growled something about my being a callow idiot. It was Bristow who really opened fire. He turned as red as a turkey cock and started shrieking about my insulting his 'family.' He said he never wanted to see me in his office again, and I told him his office was no place for an officer or a gentleman."
"Wow! That must have done it."
"And I told him, if he wanted to associate with swine like Gould and Fisk, he was welcome to their sty."
Selby looked at his brother wonderingly. "You called them swine? To their faces?"
"It was a pleasure."
"And how did they take it?"
"Gould didn't even seem to hear. What did he care for an insect like me? Fisk guffawed. He said he was going to tell P. T. Barnum he'd found an honest broker! I would have slapped his sassy face had Frank Work not got in between us."
"And then what happened? You left?"
"It was all I could do. Old Bristow followed me out into the street, still shrieking. I thought he'd taken leave of his senses. I didn't even turn around. I just walked off."
"So!" Selby glanced at his watch. "Something tells me I'm going to disappoint Aunt Lily tonight. She boasts she has never sat down to dinner without an even table of men and women. Tonight she may discover what it is to be short a man. Unless she asks her butler to join the guests." He scribbled a note on the counter and gave it to the bartender to be delivered by hand to Mrs. Van Rensselaer's.
"What are you going to do?" Fred demanded.
"I'm going to call on Miss Bristow. I, at least, may still be admitted in Madison Square."
"Bless you, Selby, boy. Tell her I adore her!"
"And don't stay here drinking all night. Go home and go to bed!"
At Madison Square, after some delay because of the lateness of the hour, Selby was ushered into the library where he found Elmira alone. She listened silently, her eyes intently upon him, as he told his tale.
"So that's what happened. I couldn't make out from Pa. He was almost incoherent."
"I'm afraid Fred let his anger get the better of him. He should have thought more of you before he was so rude to your father."
"I like him just as he is, thank you very much! I wanted him out of that world, and now he's out. I suppose he's lost everything he had in this business?"
"Probably."
"Well, I think I know a way that can be remedied. I'll go to Uncle Corneel."
"Uncle Corneel? Won't he listen to your father?"
"He loathes my father!"
"And what will Fred do when you've bailed him out?"
"Become a lawyer. As he should have been from the beginning. In your father's firm."
"You have thought it out."
"Somebody had to."
Selby, walking south to Union Square, found himself wondering if Fred would admire as much as he did the fiery passion that he had evoked in his beloved. He sighed. It was perhaps just as well for all of them that Ellie was too much obsessed with his brother to be even aware of other admirations.
He found his father alone in his study. His mother had gone to one of her meetings. Selby considered it characteristic of his father's departmentalized neatness that the room should contain no law books or paintings. Law was for the office; the seascapes were for the big, downstairs rooms. The little second floor chamber in back was for the personal life of Dexter Fair child. The shelves that covered the walls were filled with the contemporary English fiction that he so loved—on the desk was an open volume of The Last Chronicle of Barset—and in the few wall spaces were watercolors executed by Fairchild aunts. The only large picture was a Mount portrait of Selby's priestly grandfather—the one who had absconded to Italy. Selby, as a boy, used to search for a forecast of adultery in the brooding eyes under those bushy eyebrows.
When he had related Fred's news, his father shook his head.
"Well, I can't really regret this if it takes Fred out of the brokerage mess. But poor boy! What a blow to his pride! How does the girl take it?"
"Like a brick. She wants him to be a lawyer."
Dexter looked up in surprise. "Does she really? By George! Maybe she's the right sort, in spite of her old man."
"She has quality. What she will ultimately do with it, one can't be sure. You'd like to have Fred become a lawyer, wouldn't you, Dad?"
"I confess it."
"You'd like to have him succeed you in the firm?"
"It would be a dream come true. A fourth generation of Fairchilds! Think of it, Selby."
"Poor Dad. You really ask so little of us. I'll bet you never even suggested that to Fred."
"Well, you know how your brother is."
"But even if he'd been different, you wouldn't have. You've always wanted us to be ourselves." Selby felt a small lump in his throat as he took in the furtive embarrassment of his father's roving eye. "I've always appreciated that. No matter what we wanted, well, that was what you wanted for us. You knew I wanted to be an artist, and you were afraid I wasn't good enough. But you always kept that to yourself."
"Not very successfully, it seems."
"Oh, you can't fool me. Remember, I'm a second son. A second son knows that his parents are only poor blokes like himself."
"A second son knows how to love."
"Oh, Fred loves you, too. In his own way. But you and I, Dad ... well, we understand each other. But, as Hamlet said to Horatio, 'Something too much of this.' To change the subject. You're in a stew about Ma."
"And what should I do about it?"
"Back her up! Tell her you're with her."
"And if I'm not?"
"Say you are!"
"I can't, Selby!"
"It's like rape, Dad. Give in, and it's not so bad."
"Really, Selby! What about my principles?"
"How can you have a principle against women voting? You may think it's unwise, but you can't think it's immoral. God didn't decree that women shouldn't go to the polls, did he?"
"I'm not so sure. My father would have thought so."
Selby glanced up at the portrait and chuckled. "Well, look what a woman did to him!"
"Is a man to have nothing to say about what goes on in his own home?"
"Not if he wants peace and quiet."
"Cynic!" Dexter picked up a piece of note paper. "Maybe you think I should do this, too. It's a letter from Mr. Evarts. You know he's one of the five attorneys selected to defend the President?"
"I thought he was too much of a Republican."
"So many people thought. But he's a lawyer, first and foremost. He writes me that he's doing it for a nominal fee. He's made a list of half a dozen 'distinguished counselors' whose brains he would like to be able to pick. As a matter of public duty on their part."
"And you're one of them?"
"Yes. He would like me to come down to Washington and be available for strategy talks. Should I do it?"
"Do you believe the President's guilty?"
"I believe it would be a blessing to the nation if he were removed from office."
"That's not what I asked. Is he guilty?"
"Of high crimes and misdemeanors? For using intemperate language? For suspending Stanton as Secretary of War? For expressing doubts about the constitutionality of the Reconstruction Acts? No. Decidedly not. The whole thing's a farce. But a much graver issue is at stake..."
"Never mind the graver issue." Selby, in his sudden enthusiasm, did not hesitate to interrupt his parent. "If Johnson is charged unjustly, Johnson should be acquitted. Doesn't it have to be as simple as that?"
Dexter smiled ruefully. "And it doesn't matter to you that I'd ruin myself with the party? That I should be regarded as a traitor by a host of friends and relations? And that I should have ruled out forever the possibility of an appointment to the federal bench?"
Selby laughed in sheer delight. "You know as well as I do, Dad, that's your greatest temptation! To be the martyr of martyrs." He looked suddenly at his watch. "But now I've got to catch that sleeper!"