It was the year after the breaking of his engagement to Lalie Fenstermacher. He was living at home, getting started on the task of taking over his father’s business interests. Abraham Lockwood systematically acquainted George with the real estate holdings in the town and the farm properties in the rural area; the bank, the distillery, the coal-dredging operations in the river—and the portfolio of shares in distant enterprises. Instead of a liberal allowance Abraham Lockwood put his son on the Lockwood payroll and gave him a desk in the Lockwood & Company office. Father and son walked to work together every day and had noon dinner together at their table in the Exchange Hotel. By degrees Abraham Lockwood transferred responsibility and then ownership of minor properties to his son, and in a year’s time George Lockwood was already a well-to-do man in his own right. He was also, without realizing it, becoming more and more involved in the affairs of Lockwood & Company and in the advancement of the Lockwood Concern. He was a beloved son, in whom his father was well pleased. His mother could not stand the sight of him; he was replicating the original Abraham Lockwood with an eager innocence that she found as distasteful as though he had set out to taunt her. Adelaide Lockwood was sickened and then sick as she watched her son adopt his father’s mannerisms and try to overtake him, sometimes successfully, in cleverness. Abraham Lockwood was delighted and proud when George produced schemes to save money or make it; he would overlook the unsuccessful ones and over-praise the effectual. And always the father consciously and the mother vaguely were observing the son’s seduction by the Concern. This thing, whatever it was, that Abraham was trying to engineer was no longer resisted by Adelaide. She had given up on George, and she was only half-hearted in her attempts to hold on to Penrose. The younger son, now a freshman at Princeton, would succumb to George’s influence as George had succumbed to his father’s, and Adelaide Lockwood caught one cold after another until a particularly heavy congestion developed into pleurisy and death. She could look back and find only one triumph over the Lockwoods: she had made her father-in-law take down that wall.
Not a man or woman in Swedish Haven knew that it was not pus in the chest that had caused her death. There was no diagnosis of hatred or chagrin or frustration, and of the three tall men who stood at Adelaide’s graveside the younger two seemed grieved and baffled. The oldest man seemed only grieved, but then he was older and the aging learn to accept the inevitable. A nice stained glass window eventually was installed in the Lutheran Church in Adelaide’s memory. Pastor Bellinger was secretly grateful that Abraham Lockwood wanted no special ceremony dedicating the window; Bellinger had his doubts about how many parishioners would attend a dedication, and what could you say about a woman who would never be missed?
The widower and the bereaved son made a handsome pair on their marches between home and office, and with the departure of Adelaide Lockwood from the local scene, the all-male Lockwood establishment created less resentment than hitherto had been the case. Abraham and his son George kept pretty much to themselves, as the Lockwoods had always done, but the citizens were beginning to look upon Abraham and George Lockwood as something more than individuals; they represented, or George represented, the family’s third generation in the town; three generations of money, two generations of money with style, higher education, military service, imposing connections in Gibbsville and Philadelphia, and a continuity of residence in the town and of increasing earning power. The two men walking together, father and son, were now being spoken of in not altogether unfavorable tones as “our aristocracy.” Bigger towns had their aristocracy, and now Swedish Haven discovered it had one of its own. The aloofness that had been resented during Adelaide’s lifetime was now permissible and even admirable in the all-male Lockwood family. The Concern had been expedited by the departure of the female member of the family, and now Abraham Lockwood was ready to proceed to the next phase.
The Fenstermacher fiasco, he decided, was a lucky accident. A union with the Lebanon County Fenstermachers, headed by a judge, had at first glance offered some advantages; but from his own experience Abraham Lockwood became convinced that the Concern would be better served if George could find a suitable wife who was not Pennsylvania Dutch. The Pennsylvania Dutch knew how to hold on to their money and to make more, and they were extremely respectable when they got rich; but they were stodgy. They were middle-class Germans and with few exceptions they so remained, generation after generation. Adelaide and her family had pre-Revolutionary roots, and had been rich for more than a century; but no one even in jesting tones had ever called them aristocratic. They had shown no disposition to capitalize on their long American history or their generations of wealth. The first member of Adelaide’s family to have the look of an aristocrat was her son George, and it had taken Lockwood blood to achieve that. If George went to the Pennsylvania Dutch for a wife, his children might turn out to be Hoffners, and the Lockwood Concern would be dissolved in a single generation. Abraham Lockwood was determined that next time he would be more vigilant from the beginning when George took an interest in a young woman. Meanwhile he would consolidate his position in the boy’s esteem, which he would do by companionability, sensible generosity, and tokens of respect for his son’s judgment, and at the same time exercising early caution in the control of George’s relations with young women. The boy was concupiscent and susceptible, his father knew, and obviously attractive. He had to be watched. Fortunately he had gone through college without becoming a boozer.
Abraham Lockwood was careful not to turn into a bore. At the office he kept the boy busy and on many days they would have no conversation from eight-thirty until noon, so that the dinner hour was a recess for both. “How would you like to go to the crew races next week?”
“Next week? I’m sorry, Father, but that’s the week I’m going to that wedding,” said George.
“What wedding is that? Who’s getting married?”
“A fellow in my club, a fellow named Lassiter, is marrying a girl whose name I forget. They both live near Hazleton.”
“Franklin M. Lassiter’s son?”
“Yes. Coal-mining.”
“Oh, I know that. The Lassiters. The Wynnes. Well, you ought to have a good time up there. Those coal millionaires know how to spend their money.”
“Yes, I’m catching a train here, stopping just for me. A special train that starts in Philadelphia, picks up fellows along the way. Sleeping cars, a diner, and a chair car. We use the train as a hotel while we’re up there.”
“There was no such luxury when I was your age. Well, I’m sorry you’ll miss the crew races but you’ll have a better time where you’re going.”
“See what you missed by not going to Princeton?”
“It might surprise you to know that when I was at the University we used to feel sorry for the Princeton fellows. We were in a city, don’t forget.”
“Yes, I’ll bet you were a gay blade.”
“On that subject, silence is golden, my boy. I prefer you to have some illusions about your father.”
“All right, if you have yours about me.”
“None. Absolutely none. But have your good time now.”