Chapter 6 - BLOODLINES AND BLACKLISTS
At one-fifteen in the morning, the Board of Directors of the Waverly Navigation & Terminal Corporation did not meet in the wood-paneled boardroom on the fortieth floor of the Federal Reserve building.
They met in the library of my mother’s house on Louisburg Square.
The room had twelve-foot ceilings, three original Gilbert Stuart portraits of men who had made their money selling rum to the Continental Army, and a fireplace framed in green Connemara marble where two birch logs were burning with a dry, resinous hiss.
There were seven men seated around the long mahogany dining table that had been dragged into the center of the Persian rug.
Four of them were over seventy: the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court; the senior partner of our accounting firm; my father’s second cousin, Arthur Waverly; and the president of the bank that held the secondary paper on our Charlestown piers. The other three were younger—men with high, pale foreheads and bespoke suits from London who had spent the last five years trying to figure out how to take our docks public without the Securities and Exchange Commission discovering how many payroll checks were being issued to men who had died during the Korean War.
My mother sat at the head of the table.
She had changed her dress. The wet cashmere cape was gone, replaced by a high-necked gown of dark violet silk that made her pearls look like drops of frozen cream against her collarbones. Her hair was dry, brushed back into its severe silver coil, not a single strand out of place.
Beside her, leaning against the edge of the sideboard with a cup of black coffee in his left hand, was the federal prosecutor for the District of Massachusetts, Marcus Crane.
"The situation is quite simple, gentlemen," my mother was saying as the mahogany double doors were pushed open. "Grant has suffered what can only be described as an acute dissociative episode. He has assaulted two licensed officers of the court, he has removed two wards of the state from St. Catherine’s without medical clearance, and he has failed to respond to the grand jury subpoenas that were served at the wharf office yesterday morning."
The seven men didn't turn around immediately. They were men of business; they waited for the matriarch to finish her sentence before acknowledging the interruption.
Then I walked into the light.
I didn't have a hat. I didn't have an overcoat. My gray poplin shirt was torn at the shoulder where Victor’s hammer drill had thrown a piece of hot steel, and my boots were leaving tracks of black harbor mud across a silk Heriz rug that my grandfather had bought in Paris in 1922.
In my right hand, I carried the black leather ledger, its yellow twine trailing across the carpet like a dead snake.
Behind me came Mateo. He wasn't carrying a gun in his hand—not in this room, not in front of a federal prosecutor—but his arms were crossed over his chest, his large, flat face set in lines that made the junior partner from the law firm slide his chair back three inches from the table.
"Grant," my mother said.
She didn't raise her voice. She didn't drop her silver coffee spoon. She merely rested her palms against the edge of the mahogany table, her rings clicking once against the polish.
"You look like your grandfather when he came back from the Halifax explosion," she said. "Dirty. Unreasonable. Marcus, this is the young man I was telling you about. You can see the instability for yourself."
Marcus Crane, a man who had made his reputation putting city councilors in Danbury for taking envelopes behind the municipal courthouse, set his cup down on the saucer with a deliberate, official precision.
"Mr. Waverly," Crane said. "I have a warrant for your arrest on three counts of obstruction of justice and one count of witness tampering arising from the Charlestown grand jury proceedings. If you submit peacefully, I have agreed to allow your mother’s physicians to evaluate your fitness before you are booked at the federal building."
"Marcus," I said, walking to the foot of the table, opposite my mother. "Do you know what this book is?"
I dropped the black leather ledger onto the mahogany.
The sound was not loud, but it had the dead, final weight of a heavy stone dropped into a dry well. The yellow twine snapped on impact, the dry paper fan-tailing out across the polished wood until the first page rested against the saucer of the former Chief Justice.
The judge looked down. His glasses, which were gold-rimmed and rested on the bridge of a nose that had been broken at Harvard fifty years ago, slid down half an inch.
"Good God," the old man whispered.
"Read it, Judge," I said. "Page forty-two. June fourteen, nineteen-eighty-four. The payment to the private clinic in Charlottesville. Three thousand dollars for the post-mortem 'revision' on Julian Waverly’s death certificate."
The room went so quiet that the hiss of the birch log sounded like an open steam valve.
My mother did not look at the book. She looked at Marcus Crane, her eyes narrowing until they were two gray slits in the parchment of her face.
"Marcus," she said. "The warrant."
Crane didn't move. He was looking at the judge. In Boston, prosecutors did not cross former Chief Justices unless they were very sure the Chief Justice didn't have three friends on the First Circuit Court of Appeals who could have their pensions revoked before lunch.
"Eleanor," the judge murmured, his finger trembling as it touched the brown ink on the ledger page. "This... this is your husband’s handwriting."
"My husband was a syphilitic lunatic for the last ten years of his life," Eleanor said, her voice rising half an octave, the silver cadence beginning to show the copper underneath. "He kept notebooks filled with fantasies. He believed the Dutch were poisoning the harbor. He believed his own sisters were stealing the coal from the cellars."
"And the tapes, Mother?" I asked.
I reached into my pocket and took out the four micro-cassettes, rolling them across the mahogany table like dice. They rattled against the silver candlesticks, one of them coming to rest against Marcus Crane’s saucer.
"Side B on the third tape," I said. "That’s you, Mother. Talking to Victor Vance in the garden house at Hamilton. Telling him that Julian was 'unsuitable for the succession' because he had spoken to the priest at St. Paul’s about the money being transferred through the charitable foundations. Telling him that an accidental drowning during the spring regatta would save the family thirty years of public humiliation."
The junior partner from the law firm stood up.
He didn't say excuse me. He didn't take his briefcase. He simply walked toward the double doors, his eyes fixed on the floorboards, his face the color of skimmed milk.
"Sit down, Davis," my mother snapped.
Davis didn't sit down. He pushed the mahogany door open and vanished into the hallway, his boots clicking in rapid retreat toward the front vestibule.
"Arthur," Eleanor turned to her cousin, her hand finally coming off the table, the silver pommel of her cane shaking against the carpet. "Call the private exchange. Have the terminal security force dispatched to this house immediately. Tell them—"
"The terminal security force isn't answering, Eleanor," a voice said from the library doorway.
It was my uncle Thomas.
He was seventy-five, had three fingers missing from his left hand from an accident on the coal cranes in sixty-eight, and was wearing a grease-stained wool cardigan that smelled of diesel oil and salt cod. He had twenty men behind him in the hall—men from the longshoremen’s executive committee, men who didn't wear three-piece suits, men who carried three-foot iron pry-bars tucked into their heavy leather belts.
"Thomas," Eleanor hissed, her spine stiffening until she looked eight feet tall in the violet silk. "You are trespassing on private property."
"It isn't your property, Nellie," Thomas said, using the name she hadn't heard since she was fifteen years old in South Boston, before she learned how to speak like a Cabot. "The house belongs to the primary trust. And according to the papers Grant’s boy just brought to the union hall, the primary trust had a clause your husband put in before he took the car into the light pole."
He stepped into the room, his heavy work boots grinding the wet mud deeper into the Heriz rug.
"Any trustee who initiates a capital frame against another beneficiary forfeits the seat," Thomas read from a crumpled sheet of yellow legal paper he held in his three-fingered hand. "And if the trustee happens to have procured the death of an heir, the whole damn thing goes to the next in line. That’s Grant. Or if Grant is dead, that’s those two little boys he’s got tucked away in the choir loft behind the organ."
Eleanor looked around the table.
The Chief Justice was looking at the fireplace. The bank president was looking at his gold pocket watch. Marcus Crane was slowly, carefully sliding the arrest warrant back into his leather portfolio, his fingers avoiding the micro-cassette that sat beside his coffee cup.
"You're all cowards," my mother whispered.
May you like
"No, Nellie," Thomas said, coming to a stop beside me, his good hand resting on my shoulder with a weight that felt like an iron anchor being dropped into holding mud. "We’re just tired. We’ve been carrying your garbage down to the water for forty years, and the tide has finally gone out too far to hide the smell."
***
