Read Online The Americans by John Jakes - Free Book Online Page B

grandfather-had served. Nearby hung the oil portrait of Philip himself, painted when he was an affluent, middle-aged Boston printer. On the wall opposite, Gideon had put the framed Auguste Renoir cartoon depicting Matt and his wife, Dolly, dancing at a Paris cabaret before their permanent separation. Dolly was now teaching school at an army post in India, and raising her son, Tom. Next to the cartoon hung Gideon's contribution-a decidedly inferior one, in his opinion. Strictly speaking, he had contributed nothing, merely rediscovered a memento left by another. When he'd moved in, he had come across it in a packing crate that had evidently been abandoned in the cellar years ago. Now it was displayed as befitted a treasure-nestled in a velvet background under glass contained by a thick walnut frame. It was a splinter of wood, four inches long. He had found the splinter wrapped in oilskin and shoved in among rotted garments in the packing case. One moldering coat bore a legible label. G. Kent. From that, Gideon knew he'd found the lost piece of the mast of Old Ironsides which Jared had brought home to Gilbert from the War of 1812. Gilbert's correspondence had referred to the sliver of wood, but no Kent had seen it until Gideon chanced upon the crate. For a moment he felt tired, reluctant to attack the papers piled on his desk. Very little had changed since New Year's night. He'd made no progress in solving the problems which had sent him wandering the docks that evening and many evenings since. If anything, one of the problems had grown worse. Carter had taken to roistering more and studying even less. Gideon hadn't suffered a recurrence of the chest pain, though. That was the only part of the situation which had unproved. With a sigh, he picked up the first paper. It was a detailed cost estimate from the Herreshoff Company in Bristol, Rhode Island. John Herreshoff and his younger brother, Captain Nat, built steam launches for the United States and torpedo boats for other countries. Lately they'd introduced a new kind of pleasure boat-a small steam yacht noteworthy for its speed and economy. Gideon was negotiating for construction of an eighty-five foot vessel that would incorporate one of the Herreshoffs' innovative triple-expansion engines. He could easily have afforded one
    it of the much larger floating palaces of the kind skippered by Astor, Gould, and Bennett. A Herreshoff yacht was more to his taste. He intended to christen it Auvergne, after the region in France where Philip had been born. He studied the estimate for ten minutes, wrote several questions on the margin and approved the total, appending a note to the Herreshoffs asking them to proceed with all speed. Next he read a memorandum from his banker, Joshua Rothman. It informed him that the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company could now make service available between his home and the Rothman Bank. Except for communication between cities, Gideon considered Mr. Bell's telephones an impractical novelty. But he liked to surround himself with the latest gadgets, so he scribbled a note to the bank officer who handled details of his account. The note authorized installation of a line. To the first note he pinned a second one approving a new roof for the family home at Long Branch, New Jersey, where his father's widow, Molly, a near-invalid now, lived the year round. He turned to a belated letter of appreciation from the young Irishman, Oscar Wilde, with whom Gideon and his Beacon Hill neighbor, William Dean Howells, had shared a delightful evening at the Kent dinner table the preceding year. Boston had been one of the stops on Wilde's American lecture tour. Gideon and Howells-both of whom favored the new, more realistic approach to literature which Howells practiced in his novels-had jumped at the chance to entertain the young aesthete. The country's chief defender of old-fashioned literary virtue, Edmund Clarence Stedman of New York-"The Mrs. Astor of poesy,"