Back Bay (31 page)

Sean intended to tell the story of Denny Dundee’s life, from his boyhood on a farm in Kerry to his death at the hands of British soldiers on a heath in England. Sean stopped reading after Denny
lost his virginity to a farm girl in a haystack. “That’s all I’ve written. I’ve a long way to go.”

“It’s a fine poem, but I wouldn’t be telling people you aspire to Byron. You’re not writing
Childe Harold
. You’re writing an Irish balled, and a good one.”

The boy smiled. “Will you show it to a publisher, then?”

“You must finish it, first.”

“I’m straight to it.” He started to leave.

“Sean, I haven’t dismissed you.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

She called him over and told him to sit down beside her. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know you today, Sean. I’ve enjoyed your poetry and you.”

He blushed and looked at the floor. He didn’t know how to respond.

She leaned close to him. She caressed his lips with her tongue.

That autumn, she made love to the boy almost every day. In the late afternoon, when the sun slanted low through the windows of her sitting room, she would send for Sean, leave instructions that they were not to be disturbed, and listen to his poetry. Then, she would take him to her bed.

He worshipped her. He came to her each day filled with a sense of adolescent awe and admiration. He did not see Abigail as the daughter of a fortune, as the avenue to her father. He was no suitor or officeseeker, but a guileless Irish boy overwhelmed by her beauty, breeding, and grace. He did not love her; he did not consider himself worthy to love her. Instead, he wondered each day that this woman would listen to his poetry and allow him to enter her body.

Once, he came to her room and, without any pretense at reading, kissed her passionately. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he had been drinking with his friends. He ground his loins against her and pinched her nipples through her cotton dress. She had fantasized all day the feel of him, but she pulled away and angrily dismissed him. She did not allow him back to her room for a week.

When he appeared the following Sunday, he carried twenty-five
pages of new poetry under his arm. She listened to him for half an hour, then told him to kneel in front of her. She lifted her dress above her waist. She was wearing nothing underneath it, but he did not move toward her temptations. He was docile, submissive.

“Kiss it,” she commanded.

He obeyed, for twenty minutes. Then she sent him away still stiff and sore inside his tight pantaloons.

Abigail did not love the boy, but she found him to be the perfect lover. His passion for her body satisfied her lust, and his willing obedience satisfied her passion for control. She used him, in the way that men had used her, as a means to an end. When she began to feel useless, he reminded her that she was not. When she began to wonder if she would ever direct the movement of her life, if she would ever achieve power in the family company, he gave her confidence in her ability to manipulate others. Without it, she could never overcome her brother.

Horace Taylor Pratt died peacefully in his sleep on December 4, 1825. Two days later, as the first blasts of winter shivered the oaks in the Old Granary Burying Ground, he went to his grave. His funeral was not large. His peers respected his brilliance, but few called him friend.

Most of the mourners were members of the family. However, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Pratt’s competition in the opium trade, was there. Gardiner Greene paid his respects. And many of the Lowells stood by the grave, since he was father-in-law to one of their own.

Patrick Tracy Jackson, brother-in-law of the late Francis Cabot Lowell and the major stockholder in the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, paid little attention to the final reading. He stood at the edge of the throng and gazed up toward Pratt’s house on Pemberton Hill. He had already begun to think about railroads connecting Boston to his mills in Lowell, and now he was wondering where he could build a depot. The height of Pemberton Hill gave him an idea; he would not act upon it for five years.

The Reverend Mr. Russell concluded his reading. Jason turned the first shovel of dirt onto the coffin. Abigail wiped a single tear
from her eye. The service was over. A dusting of snow flurried down, and the mourners hurried for their carriages.

Jason lingered a moment to watch the gravediggers cover his father’s body. He felt a son’s grief at his father’s passing, but he did not deceive himself. He was glad that his father was gone. Jason Pratt now commanded his own destiny. He no longer stood in his father’s shadow. Another cold blast cut through him. He needed a warm fire and a glass of port. He turned to leave.

Abigail, in black cape, dress, and bonnet, was standing nearby. “I find it difficult to cry.”

“His death has freed us all of a terrible burden.”

“Yes. Now we must press ahead with his business.”

Jason took Abigail’s hand. He felt a burst of affection for his younger sister, who seemed so pale and vulnerable. “It is our business, Abigail, and I will operate it in our interest.”

She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. “We must trust one another, Jason, in memory of our father.”

Jason smiled and offered his arm. Abigail placed her hand on his elbow. The snow was falling more heavily now. Together they walked toward Tremont Street.

“How much would you estimate that the company is now worth?” she asked.

“Mr. Curtis recently reached the figure of nine hundred thousand dollars.”

“A fortune.”

“Yes, but very little of it in hard specie. Most of our money is tied up in the ships, land, and stocks that produce our monthly incomes.”

She stopped. “We are richer than that, Jason. You must promise on your father’s grave, never to reveal what I am going to tell you, unless I first give you permission.”

He sensed her solemnity. He agreed.

“Someplace in the waters around Boston, there is a treasure. It is worth forty or fifty thousand dollars. Father was the only man who knew its nature and location. I am the only woman. One day, it will be worth as much as two Indiamen. Remember that it is always at your disposal.” She watched the astonishment spread
across her brother’s face. She kissed him on the cheek and hurried to her carriage.

That afternoon, Abigail made one short entry in her diary:

I
t was six in the morning when the heat woke Peter Fallon from a fitful sleep. He wanted to roll over, but the air in his room was too thick and there were too many things on his mind. He was wide awake before his eyes were open. He peeled back the damp top sheet, which stuck to his body like a second skin, swung his legs out of bed, and kicked over the two beer cans he’d left on the floor the night before.

Half a warm Narragansett spread across the linoleum and made the place smell like a brewery. Fallon didn’t bother to clean it up. After a cool shower, he threw on a pair of tennis shorts, a blue jersey, and a pair of black high-top sneakers. He grabbed a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator and left.

Fallon looked at the digital clock above the Cambridge Trust: Wednesday, June 10, six-fourteen
A.M
., eighty degrees and the air thick with moisture. He was sweating already. He gulped down the orange juice and walked toward the gray Volvo parked on Massachusetts Ave. He didn’t notice James Buckley sleeping in a black Oldsmobile across the street, and Buckley didn’t notice him.

Fallon rolled down all the windows, opened both vents, and sped across the Larz Anderson Bridge. He had to move, if only to stay cool. He couldn’t sit and wait for Jack Ferguson to walk down his hallway again, and the Public Library wasn’t open, so he couldn’t read Ferguson’s
Hubcap
articles.

On sleepless mornings, Fallon often roamed the streets of Boston. He would absorb the quiet, the emptiness, the almost religious stillness of Beacon Hill and the Common. Or he would sit alone in the middle of Government Center Plaza, surrounded by mountains of brick, glass, and concrete. And he would think. If he had been thinking too much, he would simply stare.

Then, he would stop at the all-night cafeteria on Summer Street, have a cup of coffee, and watch the last of the night people filter off into the daylight. He liked the night people. They seemed to belong in an empty city, and they always fitted his early-morning moods. They were janitors, cabbies, and cleaning women, drunks, hookers, and hustlers. They were the losers and near-losers, exhausted by night and by life. Some talked. Some sat and stared. A few fell asleep in their coffee cups. But among the night people at dawn, Fallon sensed a feeling of community that he never noticed during the day. Attracted by the simple presence of humanity, the night people came to the cafeteria after a long night. They had survived the dark and made it through to first light. In the long run, Fallon often thought, that was all that could be said for anybody.

After the cafeteria, Fallon usually strolled State Street, Boston’s high road of finance since 1630. He had often imagined the generations who struggled there to build New England and a few enduring fortunes. He saw Hancocks, Pratts, Lowells, and Kennedys as they hurried from water-front to counting house, from bank to brokerage firm, manipulating and maneuvering, investing capital and ingesting competitors. He could see them battling with history, fighting to control its flow, struggling to direct their own thrust through it, and burning brightly with a passion that ultimately consumed them all.

Sometimes, as Fallon reached the end of State Street and looked out toward the sea, he wondered if, for all their power and success, the men who built the empires knew less about life than the night people after all. He was never sure.

This morning, Fallon parked on Tremont Street and wandered into the Old Granary Burying Ground. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He had been drawn there, he supposed, by Horace Taylor Pratt, who had been dead for 150 years and could still
awake him on a summer morning. He found Pratt’s grave under an oak in a distant corner. He knelt in the grass and read the inscription on the weatherbeaten stone.

“Horace Taylor Pratt, 1750–1825; Beloved Husband of Alicia Howell Pratt, 1760–1805; Father of Horace, Jason, and Abigail.” Beneath that was a quotation from Milton’s
Paradise Lost:
“… and one for all/Myself expose, with lonely steps to tread/Th’unfounded deep, and through the void immense/To search with wan’dring quest a place foretold/Should be, and, by concurring signs, ere now/Created vast and round, a place of bliss…”

Fallon had expected that Pratt might leave something more substantial on the ground above his head, but at least the old man was consistent. He probably considered the monument as useless as ceremonial silver tea sets, and perhaps he knew that the cemetery itself would become a monument to him. The Old Granary Burying Ground was a rare patch of green in the middle of the city, and it overflowed with Pratt’s descendants.

Fallon looked around at the various Pratt tombstones. Abigail Pratt Bentley had turned to earth in one of the last plots to be filled. He was attracted to her grave by another quotation from Milton. “The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring/New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell,/And after all their tribulations long/See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,/With Joy and Love triumphing, and fair Truth.”

Fallon wondered briefly what significance Milton held for the Pratts, but he was more interested in the dates and what they told him about Abigail. “Born 1790, Died 1874, Beloved Wife of James Elwood Bentley, 1789–1811.” Abigail had been a twenty-four-year-old widow when the tea set was stolen. Fallon recalled, from one of Pratt’s letters, that Abigail had returned to his house after the death of her husband. She had lived with Pratt through the crisis of 1814 and the death of his grandson. Perhaps she knew the truth about the boy’s death and other events that took place in the Back Bay.

Although Fallon tried to caution himself that she might never have heard a thing, his mind was beginning to race. He had seen Abigail’s diaries in the Searidge attic, and Carrington had said he could read them. If he could get into the house and go through
them, he might find something about the Golden Eagle. He headed quickly out of the cemetery, but before he reached Tremont Street, his mind was spinning in reverse. The Pratts might not let him get into the house, and the chances were excellent that beyond Dexter Lovell’s note, there wasn’t another reference to the Golden Eagle in all of Searidge. He leaned against one of the monuments, jammed his hands into his pockets, and kicked at the grass. He needed help.

It was seven-thirty when Fallon pressed the buzzer at Evangeline Carrington’s South End townhouse.

The South End had been developed in the 1850s as an attractive area for Boston’s middle class, with blocks of airy red-brick rowhouses on elm-planted streets. But the middle class did not stay. By 1885, the buildings had become boardinghouses and six-to-a-room immigrant apartments. By 1910, the South was a patchwork of tough ethnic neighborhoods, split down the middle by the steel girders of the Boston Elevated Railway Company. Eventually, the immigrants moved to the suburbs, and the South End became an extension of Roxbury’s black ghetto. In recent years, gentrification had begun. Young professionals, both black and white, were buying and rehabilitating old bowfronts, while the poor were being forced out. It was an area in transition.

Fallon heard footsteps on the other side of the door. He picked up the
Globe
and the
New York Times
that lay on the step. He heard a click—one lock was released. Then another—the dead bolt. The door snapped open six inches and a pair of bleary eyes peered over the chain lock.

“Who is it?” The voice was heavy with sleep.

“Paperboy,” said Fallon as he held out the newspapers.

“What do you want at seven-thirty in the morning?” she asked groggily.

“I have to talk with you.”