George’s study of the bass clef was resumed under Miss Bessie Auchmuty, organist at the Swedish Haven Lutheran Church. Abraham Lockwood concluded that it was not his duty to inform the Gibbsville parents of Fischer’s overtures. The joint venture between Abraham Lockwood and Peter Hofman entailed no such responsibility. The Gibbsville parents could safeguard their own young, and Abraham Lockwood would do the same for his. It was altogether possible that the Gibbsville parents had deliberately refrained from warning him that Fischer was a degenerate, and in any event Abraham Lockwood, in undertaking to build a toll bridge that would mutually benefit the two towns, had not committed himself to a program of furthering the interests of a town where so many leading citizens still looked down their noses at him. If any Gibbsville parents should ask him why he had changed piano teachers, he would tell the truth; otherwise he would remain silent. (As it happened, the Gibbsville parents, without having had any information from Abraham Lockwood, subsequently banished Fischer, and for several years musical education of the very young was at a standstill. )
The boys’ religious training was left to Adelaide; Abraham Lockwood was not on sure ground in such matters. He could not convincingly give the fundamentalist answers to their inevitable questions, and attendance at church on Sunday was as far as he cared to carry his recognition of the place of formal religion. For a time he considered the desirability of subsidizing an Episcopal mission in Swedish Haven. The Episcopal was the church of fashion, increasingly so in the East and especially so in Philadelphia and Gibbsville. There were not enough potential Episcopalians in Swedish Haven to warrant the forming of a parish, but Trinity Church in Gibbsville served a mission in Collieryville, which was the same distance from Gibbsville as Swedish Haven. A Trinity Church curate conducted weekly services in the Collieryville Odd Fellows Hall, and Abraham Lockwood had no doubt that he could persuade the rector of Trinity to provide the same facility for Swedish Haven. But Abraham Lockwood, after viewing the project from the point of view of his Concern, decided that the boys were better off as Lutherans, at least until they were ready to go away to boarding school. He and his father were forever on the records as donors of the Swedish Haven Lutheran Church, and it would be foolish to toss away such a respectable bit of family history. (“My grandfather gave the Lutheran Church.”) The boys already were third-generation Lutherans. Then too, the Lutheran faith was, in a manner of speaking, the indigenous denomination of Swedish Haven, comparable to the Society of friends in Philadelphia, or even the Catholics in New Orleans. In Abraham Lockwood’s view it was all the same God when you came right down to it, and when the boys sang about the Faith of Our Fathers they were stating a historic fact. The Lockwoods of Swedish Haven would naturally be Lutherans, and it was no more inconsistent for Lockwoods to be Lutherans than for the important German-name brewers and meat packers to belong to Trinity Church in Gibbsville.
At this stage of their growth the boys chose their playmates among their contemporaries, without regard to the economic or social status of the playmates’ parents. During the school day George and, later, Penrose were in the company of boys whose families could afford private schooling; at home in Swedish Haven, George had for chums the sons of a minister, a physician, a grocer, a railway brakeman, and the Negro porter at the Exchange Hotel. Penrose’s playmates were from the families of the physician and the grocer, and the others were sons of a jeweler-watchmaker, a widowed schoolteacher, and a second cousin of the notorious Bundy brothers. There were certain areas where the boys were forbidden to go: the railroad yards, the quarry pond, and the jungle north of town which was snake-infested and full of treacherous water-holes. The boys learned to swim and to skate at the canal, and to skin-the-cat in various barns, steal plums and cherries from various orchards, hop ice wagons, experiment with stogies and chewing tobacco, attempt sexual intercourse with the grocer’s daughter, commit vandalism in the week preceding Hallowe’en, and try Roman riding with George’s and the physician’s sons’ ponies. George skinned his forehead and nose in a dive at the quarry, and Penrose fractured his left arm in a fall from a chestnut tree. Punishment was by spanking; barehanded by Adelaide when they were young; with an old trunk strap by their father when they were older.
Ostensibly the boys throughout the grammar school years led lives that were no different from their contemporaries’. Abraham Lockwood was not making a conscious special effort to teach the boys equality. On the contrary, his eventual purpose was to send his sons to boarding school at the earliest possible age, and so to arrange their vacation schedules that they would have very little time to spend with the sons of the brakeman, the porter, the schoolteacher, and the cousin of the Bundy brothers. But he did not want his sons to grow up as bookish freaks, as sissies, as latchers-on-to-Momma’s-apron-strings. It was likewise his wish to let his sons have an early acquaintance with all classes in the town, so that when the time came for them to assume the position they would occupy according to the Concern, they would not do so as strangers or virtual newcomers. His own father, and even more so his own grandfather, had mental records and working acquaintance with every citizen in the town, and so had he himself. His sons would not be absentee landlords; they would follow the proprietary tradition of the resident gentry, who knew their people, and George and Penrose were off to a good start.
Abraham Lockwood’s Concern was not a bothersome thing, a chore, and it interfered amazingly little with his business career. With the Concern to guide him it was easy to make small and great decisions governing the raising of the two boys, despite the mystification of and occasional opposition from their mother. Nearly everything relating to the boys’ present could be related to the future of the Concern: the boys’ education, manners, attire, appearance, and the subtler items of pride, hauteur, independence, honesty, self-control, moderation and ambition. Oddly, as they grew older into adolescence, the boys developed a filial love that was to Abraham Lockwood quite unexpected, and to their mother seemed somewhat perverse. They went to her for warmth, but they esteemed his approval. This thin, sharp man, who said no to so many of their requests, was nevertheless a positive factor in their daily lives, omnipresent even when they were secretly disobeying him, and always the adult they were most eager to please. Their love was his reward for his interest in them, which at their ages they accepted without looking for a reason behind it.
With the same unquestioning submission,. George, completing the eighth grade in 1887, departed for St. Bartholomew’s, an event of major significance in his father’s Concern, and one that had taken a great deal of serious consideration. The school was now old enough to have graduated some thirty classes, members of which had gone on almost without exception to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Williams, and the University of Virginia, or to theological seminaries. It was a church school, the church being the Episcopal, situated in Eastern Massachusetts, and except for a handful of Southern boys, the students came from cities and towns in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Although not themselves alumni, Harry Penn Downs and Morris Homestead were sending their sons to St. Bartholomew’s. This fact, while influencing Abraham Lockwood, was of secondary importance in his consideration of suitable schools. Of major importance was the school’s New England location and its graduates’ records at the colleges—needless to say, their extra-curricular records. Abraham Lockwood had already decided upon Princeton for his sons, but he wanted them to have friends at Harvard, Yale, and Penn as well, and since the majority of St. Bartholomew’s boys went to Harvard or Yale, the school provided the right opportunities for such friendships. Abraham Lockwood carefully avoided the appearance of imitating Downs and Homestead, and did not ask them for help in placing George at St. Bartholomew’s. Instead he went about it through Gabriel Bromley, assistant rector of Trinity Church, Gibbsville, and Joe Calthorp, a classmate and Zeta Psi at the University, both personal friends of the rector-headmaster of St. Bartholomew’s. Abraham Lockwood wisely decided not to attempt to impress the school with his modest claim to social correctness, but to underplay his Philadelphia trumps. In the course of his correspondence and his single interview with Arthur Francis Ferris he told the headmaster that he hoped to have his sons accepted at St. Bartholomew’s because their background for a hundred years had been solid Pennsylvanian, on both sides of the family, and since he could afford it, he wanted them to have the benefit of New England education. He lightly mentioned New England origins, but candidly stated that neither he nor his father nor his grandfather had any personal acquaintance with those Lockwoods.