"It's winter there, but we'll manage."
Better than I'm managing, George thought, with a deep melancholy. It had held him in its grip, making him unreasonably pensive and lethargic, ever since his confrontation with Stevens in Washington.
Constance said, "If your ship calls at the port of Los Angeles for more than a few hours, please visit my father's law office, and give him my love."
"By all means," Billy said, nodding. The conductor called, "All aboard." From a few steps away, Patricia waved at the departing travelers. William had his eye on an attractive girl hurrying into a rear car. Through her smile, Patricia hissed, "Wave, you rude beast!" William stuck out his tongue at her, then waved.
The Lehigh Valley local began to move. George rushed along the platform beside Billy and Brett's car, calling out, "Do press Madeline about another loan if she needs it." "We will," Brett called back. "Billy, send a message when you're safely settled." "Promise," his brother shouted. The whistle shrilled. "You let me know if the War Department finds Charles."
George replied with an emphatic nod; the car was drawing away. So far the Department had failed to answer two letters from Billy asking the whereabouts of his best friend, who was supposed to be serving in the cavalry out West.
George ran faster, waving his shiny plug hat and shouting other things, which no one heard. Constance called to him to come back. The train chugged past the end of the platform and gained speed, following the riverbank and the old canal bed. Billy and Brett disappeared.
How George envied their youth, their independence. He admired their bravery, too, in setting out for a state they'd only read about in unreliable Gold Rush guidebooks. Americans were prospering in California, though. Four businessmen were blasting and tunneling through the Sierras to build part of a transcontinental rail line, and in a few years the Pacific coast would be linked with the rest of the country. Billy was determined to start a civil engineering firm, and no promise from George of a secure and lucrative future with Hazard's would deter him.
"Damn," George said, stopping at the end of the platform. He wiped his eyes before turning back to his family. He knew what his brother meant about memories east of the Mississippi. They had discussed it for hours one night, after everyone else was asleep. The war had touched both of them — changed them, perhaps damaged them, in ways that were deep, fundamental, and, in some cases, beyond understanding.
George described a meeting with two ex-soldiers before he left Washington. In the saloon bar at Willard's Hotel, the men had been drinking heavily; they were blearily candid. One and then the other admitted that he felt bereft now that the highly charged excitement of the war was but a memory.
As the night grew older, each of the brothers told of his own ghosts. Billy would forever be haunted by memories of his comrade, old Lije Farmer, who'd died in battle despite his unshakable belief in God's goodness. Nor could he forget his internment in Libby Prison, or the mistreatment there; he still had nightmares about it. He probably would have died there but for his wild, desperate escape, planned and carried, out by Charles and Orry Main. And, from the end of the war, he remembered the ruthless, bleak look of his best friend, Charles, the last time they met.
George couldn't forget the moment he learned of Orry's death, or the half hour he'd knelt by Orry's empty grave at Mont Royal, burying there a letter of friendship written in 1861 but never sent. The letter expressed his hope that the ties of affection between the Mains and the Hazards would survive the war, and that each of the family members would survive, top. For Orry, it had been a vain wish.
Sunk in despondency, George walked back to his family. Constance saw his condition. She took his arm as they returned to the lacquered phaeton, its hinged top section folded down in the August heat. The driver held the door for the Hazards, then took his seat and popped the whip over the heads of the fine matched bays.
My town, George thought as the phaeton proceeded toward the hill road. He owned a majority interest in the Bank of Lehigh Station, one square over, and he owned the Station House Hotel, on his left, and about a third of the real estate within the town limits. Most of it was in the commercial section along the river, but he also owned fourteen substantial brick homes on the higher, terraced streets. These were rented by foremen at Hazard's and by some of the wealthier merchants.
As the carriage rolled along, George searched the streets for the town's three war casualties. He saw the blind boy begging on the crowded sidewalk near Pinckney Herbert's general store. He didn't see the peg-legged boy, but in the next block he spied Tom Hassler.
"Stop, Jerome. Just for a moment."
He jumped from the carriage; Patricia and William sighed with impatience. George's short legs carried him to the boy he'd given a job at Hazard's. But Tom couldn't manage even the simplest task, so he shambled through Lehigh Station every day, rattling a tin cup in which his mother put pebbles to suggest that others had already given. George stuffed a ten-dollar note in the cup. The sight of Tom's slack mouth and dead brown eyes always destroyed him. Like the town's other two maimed veterans, Tom Hassler was not yet twenty.
"How are you today, Tommy?"
The boy's vacant eyes drifted across the hazy river to the laurel-covered slopes on the far side. "Fine, sir. Waiting for orders from General Meade. We'll charge those rebs over there on Seminary Ridge before dark."
"That's right, Tom. You'll carry the day, too."
He turned away. How shameful, this urge to weep that came upon him so often of late. He climbed into the phaeton and slammed the half-door, avoiding his wife's eye. How shameful! What is happening to me?
What was happening, he sometimes understood, was exactly what had happened to his brother and to thousands of other men. Powerful and unfamiliar emotions in the wake of the surrender. Bad dreams. Thoughts of friendships formed in the strange giddy atmosphere of ever-present death. Memories of good men slain in pointless skirmishes, and of fools and pale trembling cowards who survived by accident or by means of a feigned illness the night before a battle ...
What had happened to George, and to America, was a four-year struggle of a kind never before experienced in the world. Not only had cousin slain cousin, brother slain brother — that was not new — but mechanized weapons, the railroad, the telegraph, had brought a new efficiency to the art of slaughter. In meadows and creek bottoms and pretty, rustic glens, innocents had fought the first modern war.
It was a war that refused to release George now. Constance saw that in her husband's pained, lost eyes as the phaeton followed the winding road up toward Belvedere, their mansion on the summit. She wanted to touch him, but she felt that his pain was beyond her reach — perhaps beyond anyone's.
George spent the afternoon at Hazard's. The firm was almost completely converted from war production to the fabrication of wrought iron for architectural embellishment, cast-iron parts for other products, and, perhaps most important, rails. Nearly all of the South's railroads were in ruins. And in the West, two lines had created another huge new market. The Union Pacific, along the Platte route, and the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, in Kansas — no connection despite similar names — were racing each other to the hundredth meridian. The first to lay track to the meridian would win the right to go the rest of the way and link up with the Central Pacific, building east from California.
George didn't arrive home until the family members had dined and were gathered around their new treasure, a grand piano, sent as a gift by Henry Steinweg and his sons in New York. Hazard's provided much of the iron plate for the firm's pianos, which were called Steinways, because Steinweg thought that name more euphonious, commercial, and American. Steinweg had come a long way from the red field of Waterloo, where he'd soldiered against Napoleon. George liked him.