Chapter 7 - THE SEVERING
Marcus Crane was the first to speak after the silence became unbearable.
"The federal office will require the original recordings for forensic authentication, Mr. Waverly," he said, not looking at my mother. He stood up, buttoning his gray overcoat with fingers that were remarkably steady for a man who had just watched his primary political patron get dismantled by her own family.
"You'll get copies, Marcus," I said. "The originals are in a safe deposit box at the State Street Trust under three names: mine, Thomas's, and June Harper's. If an indictment against me is filed before nine o'clock tomorrow morning, those tapes will be delivered to the Boston Globe, the Attorney General's office, and the presiding judge of the First Circuit."
"That sounds like a threat, Mr. Waverly."
"It's a settlement conference," I replied. "You wanted the harbor contracts cleaned up. You'll get them. The Dutch conglomerate will not be purchasing the terminals. The leases will be transferred to a public-private trust administered by the longshoremen's union and the city port authority. The Waverly family will retain fifteen percent of the gross wharfage, non-voting, held in an irrevocable education trust for Julian and Leo Bennett."
"Bennett?" my mother spat out, the venom returning to her voice as she stood up from her chair, her hands trembling so violently that the pearls around her neck rattled against each other like dry bones. "You would give our grandfather’s name to that little gutter-girl from the music school? You would strip this house of its legacy for two bastards born in a charity ward?"
I walked around the table until I was standing two feet from her.
She looked smaller now. Without the authority of the trust, without the seven men sitting around her mahogany board waiting for her nod, she was just an old woman in a violet dress with too much powder on her neck and a silver cane that had lost its balance.
"Julian died because he was kind, Mother," I said, my voice dropping until only she and Thomas could hear it. "And you killed him because you thought kindness was an infection that would ruin the firm. But Mara didn't die tonight. And those boys didn't die tonight. You lost, Eleanor. The only thing left of your life is deciding whether you spend your remaining years in the house at Hamilton with a nurse who doesn't speak English, or in the women’s correctional facility at Framingham with the girls from the North End."
Eleanor didn't flinch. She lifted her head, her nostrils flaring, her gray eyes staring into mine with the same absolute, unyielding cold that had frozen my father’s heart twenty years ago.
"You will fail, Grant," she said. "You have your father’s stomach. You can't run this city with clean hands. Within six months, the Italian families will take the south piers, the state police will close the fuel docks, and you will come back to this room on your knees, asking me where the ledgers are."
"The ledgers are on the table, Mother," I said. "And the Italian families have already signed the new stevedoring agreements with Thomas."
She looked at Thomas.
Thomas didn't smile. He took his three-fingered hand off my shoulder, pulled a plug of black tobacco from his cardigan pocket, and bit off the end with a dry, ripping sound.
"The world changed while you were sitting in this library, Nellie," Thomas said. "You were so busy looking at the stock tickers on the telephone that you didn't notice the boys who unload the ships don't live in the North End anymore. They live in Dorchester, they live in Quincy, and they don't give a damn about the Waverly family crest on the carriage house gates."
Eleanor turned toward the private secretary.
"Victor," she said.
The room was empty behind her.
Victor Vance had left ten minutes ago, through the servant’s passage that led down to the brick alley behind Mount Vernon Street. A man who carries titanium shears in his pocket always knows when the ship has taken enough water to reach the boiler room.
"Get out of this house, Mother," I said.
She stared at me for another five seconds, her chest rising and falling beneath the violet silk, then she reached out with her cane, knocked the empty coffee cup off the table—it shattered against the hearthstone with a sharp, hollow *tink*—and walked toward the double doors.
She didn't take an overcoat. She didn't take her purse.
She walked through the center of the twenty longshoremen standing in the hall, her silver head held so high her chin pointed toward the molded plaster medallions of the ceiling, her cane tapping the oak parquet with that same dry, mechanical cadence:
One. Two. Pause.
One. Two. Pause.
May you like
Until the heavy front door of the mansion on Louisburg Square opened, admitted the roar of the rain and the sound of the wind through the bare elms, and clicked shut behind her with the finality of a spade striking wet earth over a pine box.
***
