“Before you start to worry,” said Hazelton Culross, sensing the waves of anxiety crashing around him, “consider that Tetrazinni himself may not know if there are any current presumed heirs. He would have to do the legwork to establish names and whereabouts. And if and when he finds them he would have to persuade them that they have a claim worth pursuing. He would likely get them to sign a contract with him and only then would things go forward. If these heirs are Canadian it is another layer of difficulty for Tetrazinni to work through. All those things take time and money and the lawyer would have to bear the cost. And then he would come up against a company that for centuries has been directed and led first by the Dukes, then by the Breitsprechers, accepted as the legitimate owners of the properties and the operators of a legitimate business for almost three hundred years. Even if he put the effort and money into finding any living heirs, Tetrazinni would have the slimmest chance of getting anywhere with this. I would put it out of my mind and continue as you always have.”
There was a silence, a grateful silence. Andrew took a deep breath and said, “But we have discussed selling the company. International Paper is interested. Except for the seedling division,” he added hastily as Conrad half-stood.
“But there’s still a chance the heirs could sue us, right?” he asked, fixed and tense.
“Well, yes. Anything is possible. But I don’t think any court would give them the time of day.”
“Well, I give them the time of day,” said Conrad. “I find all this very disturbing.” And he rushed from the room.
Hazelton Culross looked at James Bardawulf, at Sophia and Andrew. “He really seems to see this as a threat. He is overreacting.”
Claude said, “He has never been right since his war experience. It may sound far-fetched but I have heard of delayed reactions to war experiences.”
Hazelton’s advice was simple: “Stay away from Tetrazinni. Don’t go looking for trouble.”
• • •
Almost two weeks later Sophia found a memo from James Bardawulf on her desk. “Call me.” It was still ungodly hot. She worried about sweat stains on her silk blouse. The air conditioner sent out a tepid waft of mold-scented air. She dialed her brother’s number, got his snotty new secretary with her English-accented “May I say who is calling please?”
“Tell him it’s his old mistress.”
There was an intake of breath, a lengthy silence, then James Bardawulf’s cautious little “Hello?”
“I got your memo,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Sophia! Don’t ever say that kind of thing to Miss Greenberry. She believed you!”
“Englishwomen have no sense of humor.” She cut off James Bardawulf’s roars and huffs. “Calm down. Why did you want me to call you?”
“To give you some very interesting news. For us, anyway. Hazelton Culross, who takes The Philadelphia Inquirer, called me this morning. He said there’s a back-page story in today’s paper saying that a lawyer named Tetrazinni died in a fight with a burglar over the weekend. The office was wrecked, file cabinets overturned, desk drawers pulled out and the safe wide open. Tetrazinni shot. I don’t know yet if there is anything in the Chicago papers. I’ve sent out for a Trib.”
“My God. That’s extraordinary. You might even think—” A deep breath. “Have you let the others know?”
“Just you so far. I was going to call them after I talked with you. After all, you are the one who opened the whole can of worms. The primary instigator.”
Sophia let that pass. It was James Bardawulf who had started the wheels turning. “Let poor Conrad know. He was so upset that day.”
Another of James Bardawulf’s long silences. Then the little voice again. “Maybe he already knows.”
“James, what do you mean? James Bardawulf!”
“I only mean he might have seen the papers already. What did you think I meant?”
“Not important,” she said. “Talk to you later.”
His last remark floated out of the receiver: “We can proceed with the sale.”
• • •
And so, over the centuries Breitsprecher-Duke had risen and fallen like a boat on the tides. Now the tide was out. And International Paper was in. Only boxes of papers and several portraits remained of the old company. And a separate entity called Breitsprecher Seedlings.
68. Egga’s daughters
There was no going back after World War II: women were edging into jobs men had always done. Feminist rhetoric floated in the air. Bren Sel thought it should be this way, and shot a combative look at her husband, Edgar-Jim Sel, called Egga, an unaware man. She believed the new ideas were a release from the bondage of history and tried to explain this to him, but Egga did not see a parallel between feminist emergence from an oppressive past and his own life and renunciation of Mi’kmaw particularity. He had come down to Martha’s Vineyard as a runaway boy escaping the residential Indian school at Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia, found work as a fisherman and later found Brenda Hingham.
When he proposed she said yes, and then, “I am marrying an enemy.”
“Enemy? How am I your enemy?”
“Do you not know that the Mi’kmaq came here and fought my people? Before the whitemen?”
“I did not know this. Was it a battle?”
“A battle? It was a war. Mi’kmaw warriors took the whole New England coast. For a little time.”
“And now this Mi’kmaw wins again.” He flashed a guess that likely there had been a little infusion of Mi’kmaw into the Wôpanâak in that long-ago time.
• • •
They were an awkward match. “You don’t understand,” she said to him often.
“What don’t I understand?” he asked.
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”
The central problem, she believed, was Egga’s refusal to be Mi’kmaq.
He said, “It made my life very bad, being a Mi’kmaw person. I have put it away.”
“You can’t put away what you are. Your parents, your brothers and sisters. And all the generations behind them, your people. You cannot rinse out your blood like a dirty shirt and say it is a — a pineapple! It is you, your heritage, what you came from, it cannot be something else. And now it is part of our children and they must know it.” Egga rolled his eyes — this was what came from marrying into the matrilineal Wôpanâak.
Bren wanted to guide their two daughters toward being a new kind of woman — whiteman, Wôpanâak and Mi’kmaw mix of genes, ideas, careers, perceptions of the world. Both girls were strong-minded and smart, both sassy children who gave Egga bizarre thoughts of the residential school with its punishing nuns and priests. If his womenfolk were dropped into such a school the place would be in riot within a day, Bren, Marie and Sapatisia leading the charge, nuns and priests begging mercy. He enjoyed this vision and when one of his rambunctious girls was particularly audacious he was pleased, comparing them to the pitifully fearful Mi’kmaw children at the resi school. He wanted bold children. Very gradually, very slowly he began to talk about his old life, surprised at the sharp interest his children and wife took in his stories. When he told his parents’ names — Lobert and Nanty Sel — they wanted to write letters, go to Shubenacadie, to Lobert’s log house. They wanted to love these unknown relatives. And perhaps, thought Egga, so did he. Bren’s nagging made him wonder what being Mi’kmaq could mean beyond pain and humiliation. Bren herself was enthusiastically Wôpanâak, and again he imagined lustful and ancient Mi’kmaw warriors surging into Wôpanâak villages and women. He laughed.