Back Bay (49 page)

“Good evening, sir,” said Holt.

“Everything under control, Holt?” Pratt loved the commotion in the kitchen. He felt like a general watching the preparations for war.

“Yes, sir. And may I say that you look most elegant in black tie.”

“Well, we decided to forgo white tie and tails this year. Tone things down a bit. This is a depression, after all, and it will be
getting worse when that damn Roosevelt takes office. So we must take a tuck where we can.”

“Indeed, sir.”

Pratt opened the refrigerator. He saw mounds of caviar and fifteen dozen unshelled oysters. “Where’s the champagne, Holt?”

“Out in the snow. I elected to buy as little ice as possible. We must take a tuck where we can.”

Pratt laughed. “Yes, yes. Very good. Make sure there’s plenty of everything. Anyone who’d dig his way through three feet of snow deserves the best and the most.”

“Indeed, sir.”

Pratt turned and went up the small staircase that led to the pantry. He was sixty years old. His blond hair, which Abigail Pratt Bentley had admired when he was a baby, had turned brown when he was ten years old. Then, on a June night in 1917, it had turned gray when the news arrived that his youngest son, Philip, had been killed on the Western Front. His Pratt features—people said that he resembled the Copley portrait of Horace Taylor Pratt—made him seem stern and resilient. But he was tired. He had planned to retire in 1930 and leave the company in the hands of his sons, Artemus IV and Taylor. The stock-market crash had interfered with his plans.

Artemus Pratt III had remained to supervise the cutbacks and layoffs at various Pratt factories and mines. It had been a difficult time, but the foundation of the Pratt Corporation was strong, and the company had, up until now, withstood the storm. Pratt Rubber, the Pratt Munitions Company, Pratt Engineering, which had joined in the research into vacuum tubes and the transmission of pictures through the new medium of television, all had continued to show profit. Freight rates were down and Pratt rail holdings had not been doing well. But Artemus Pratt III was committed to America’s future, and he believed that with good Republican management, the economy would bounce back. He would have to wait four years for another Republican administration, but in the meantime, he and his sons would run the company as the country should be run.

He strolled through the dining room, where servants laid out linen, fine china, and silver for the buffet.

He stopped in the music room, a bright hall in the style of Louis Quatorze, all gilt and mirrors and crystal chandeliers. Eleven musicians in black tie, sounding like cats in an alley, tuned their instruments. Within the hour, they would become Henry Blake and His Musicmasters. They would play waltzes, gavottes and, later in the evening, the Charleston and contemporary tunes about overcoming Old Man Depression for the younger set, which rarely gave the Depression a thought.

Artemus Pratt ascended the mahogany staircase. The noises of preparation gave way to other sounds—the laughter of children at play, the bawling of three Pratt infants in the third-floor nursery, and the strains of Brahms’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in F Major.

Pratt stopped outside the parlor to listen. The cello was, at best, amateurish; his wife Clarissa was playing. The piano was subtle, expressive. Katherine Pratt Carrington’s playing was almost as exquisite as her cameo features, her long, graceful neck, her marcelled hair. She was one of the few women Artemus knew who could wear the contemporary female evening dress—bloused satin top over bare breasts—and not look like a slut on Scollay Square. Whenever he thought about her, Artemus heard Bach—cool, rational, detached, yet filled with spirit.

Artemus loved his niece like a daughter. He had cared for her like a daughter since she had returned from Europe in April of 1912, at eleven years old the only Pratt to survive the sinking of the
Titanic
. She knew that her father had stayed on board; she had been separated from her mother and two older brothers and never saw them again.

Artemus and his wife had taken his brother’s daughter into their home, nursed her back from her grief, and encouraged her to play the piano. She had eventually studied at the New England Conservatory. She had once played the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and she performed often at recitals in Boston and New York. At twenty-four, she had married Henry Carrington, a junior partner in the family law firm, and had borne two beautiful children. Jeffrey, eight years old, was deeply involved in mischief someplace on the second floor, and two-year-old Isabelle was squealing in the nursery.

Artemus looked into the room and saw a small, intimate group,
a family dressed for the ball. His younger son, Taylor, twenty-six, sat with his wife on the settee. Artemus IV, twenty-nine, stood behind his wife’s chair and sipped Scotch. After several years of failure, Artemus IV and Denise Goodby Pratt had finally produced a child, and they seemed at ease with each other for the first time in years. Both sons still lived in their father’s mammoth house, although Taylor was preparing to move to Lexington. The luckiest man in the room, thought Artemus, was Henry Carrington, who sat beside his wife at the piano bench and turned the pages of her music like a devoted servant.

Calvin, Taylor’s older child, slid down the banister from the third floor and ran toward the parlor. He was still baby-fat, and his tuxedo made him look like a miniature waiter at the Ritz. Artemus grabbed him by the collar before he could disrupt Katherine’s performance.

“Where are you going?” he whispered.

“Nanny says that baby Philip is crying, and his mother is the only one who can make him stop.”

Artemus smiled. “I’ll tell her. You run along.”

Artemus went into the room, knelt beside his daughter-in-law, and whispered in her ear, “If there are any women in this house so backward as still to be breastfeeding their infants, those women are needed in the nursery.”

Denise smiled. “He’s always hungry.”

Artemus sat in her chair and looked up at his son. “Aside from Christmas eve, this is the nicest night of the year.”

Artemus IV smiled. He was shorter and more compact than his father, with the body of a middleweight and good looks that came from 140 years of careful breeding.

Artemus III was one of the few people who ignored his son’s streak of petulance and bad temper, but he noticed tonight that his son seemed unaccountably nervous. He wondered why.

A handful of pebbles rattled against the windows. “Peter. Peter Rulick,” came the cry.

Billy and Jack looked out. They saw twenty or thirty men, all roughly dressed and bundled against the cold. Billy recognized men he had seen many times in his father’s company. Jackie saw
powerful, squat physiques, rugged features, moustaches, and long plumes of steam shooting from mouths and nostrils. They reminded him of draft horses waiting to pull a load.

Peter Rulick threw on his jacket and longshoreman’s cap.

“Be careful, Petrov,” said Anna.

He kissed her on the cheek. More stones rattled against the window.

“Let’s be goin’,” said Irish Red.

Peter started for the door, and Billy grabbed him by the arm. “I want to go too, Papa.”

“No,” said Anna firmly.

“I’m not afraid.”

“There’s nothing to fear,” said Peter, who liked the idea of bringing the boy along. “It is time he saw what a man must do. Besides, where we are going tonight, it will be warm and there will be good things to eat.”

Jackie liked the last part. “Can I go too?”

“No,” said Anna.

“What will your mother say?” said Peter.

“Oh, she don’t mind if I stay out at night,” he lied, “just so long’s I do my homework.”

Peter smiled. “Both of you raise your right hands and repeat after me. ‘I swear to obey Peter Rulick tonight, and I will uphold the laws of the Pratt Rubber Workers Union that we don’t yet have.’ ”

They swore.

“You’re honorary members. Put on your coats.”

The snow had stopped and the clouds were gone. The sky seemed bottomless and black. The city was never more beautiful or quiet than when it was frozen in snow, and Jackie always roamed the streets after a blizzard. Tonight, he walked with purpose.

He and Billy were in the middle of the group, which moved without form or apparent leadership in silence down the street. Snow crunched underfoot and men breathed hard against the cold. A block away, a snowplow ground along, its blade scraping the pavement. A train rattled past overhead, raining sparks onto the street as it scraped ice from the third rail. Jackie noticed a
blackjack in one man’s pocket, a length of pipe in another man’s hand. He wondered what kind of party they were going to.

The group crossed Washington Street and started up Dover. As they passed an apartment that many of them seemed to know, a man ran out carrying two sacks filled with rocks and several other sacks that were empty. Peter Rulick took one of the empty sacks and hung it around his neck. Then he picked up some snow and made a snowball with a rock at the center. He spat on the snowball and dropped it into his sack. A moment later Jackie and Billy were making snowballs as fast as they could.

“Don’t forget to spit on them,” said Rulick. “Spit freezes them hard.”

They crossed Tremont Street onto Berkeley and approached the Berkeley Street Bridge, which crossed the railroad tracks between the South End and the Back Bay. Jackie noticed lead pipes and blackjacks appearing all around. The group pulled into a tight circle and marched straight down the middle of the street. The men who didn’t have weapons moved to the middle of the circle, around the boys, and took as many snowballs as they could hold.

The street was dark and deserted, but Jackie Ferguson sensed the presence of other men. “I’m scared, Billy.”

“Me, too.”

The boys had not spoken since they crossed Washington Street.

“Wait till they’re close and aim for the face,” whispered Peter Rulick to the men around him.

The bridge was in sight now. Its four street lamps gleamed brightly above the railroad tracks. Jack heard the whistle of an outbound freight. Then he saw them. They looked like the men he was marching with. They wore the same rough clothes. They had the same immigrant faces. They carried clubs and lead pipes and blackjacks. They appeared from the alleys on either side of Berkeley Street and charged at the marchers.

The union men on the outside of the circle dropped to the ground. The men on the inside unleashed their snowballs and aimed for the face.

A snowball with a rock at its core can lay a face open like a ripe squash, and the union men hit their targets. Blood soaked into the
snow. The attackers fell back. The union men outnumbered them by a dozen, but the strikebreakers reorganized and came again. A second barrage of snowballs was followed by a bitter exchange between lead pipe and club. Jackie had seen fights before and been in more than his share, but he’d never seen anything like this. There was no swearing or yelling, none of the noise of a gang fight on the block. This was a silent struggle, punctuated occasionally by a grunt or the scuffing of a boot or the sound of wood slamming into bone.

The union men won and crossed the bridge into the Back Bay.

Company spies at Pratt Rubber had told their superiors about the march, and the information had traveled up the chain of command from the company plant in Brighton to the desk of Artemus Pratt IV. The younger Artemus had hired a few well-known strikebreakers to keep the demonstrators from leaving the South End. The strikebreakers had hired hungry men looking for a night’s work and street toughs who did it for fun. Artemus Pratt IV had expected that they would succeed.

The Pratt Winter Ball was in full swirl when the union men arrived. Most of the two hundred guests, some of the richest, most accomplished people in America, were dancing or were clustered around the caviar on the dining-room table. The orchestra was playing Strauss, and the champagne was disappearing as quickly as it was served. Artemus Pratt IV was heading upstairs for a game of three-cushion when he noticed a commotion at the door. Holt seemed to be arguing with someone. Then the door was thrown open and a blast of cold air knocked Holt across the hall.

Thirty men, led now by Peter Rulick and Irish Red McDonough, marched into the house.

Artemus Pratt IV was enraged. He leaped off the staircase and jumped in front of the men. “Stay right where you are.”

Peter Rulick knocked him back with one punch. Jackie Ferguson had never seen a man hit so hard.

The group marched across the foyer through the French doors, into the ballroom, and brought the frigid outside air with them. The dancers, perspiring discreetly as they waltzed, froze in their places. The orchestra stopped abruptly.

Peter Rulick began the speech he had been rehearsing all day.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced loudly, “I am sorry to spoil your party. Parties are good. Everyone should have parties. But tonight, while people are dancing in this house, people are starving in this city. Men who cry out for fair wages and decent working conditions, for unions—”

“Damn your unions!” bellowed the elder Artemus Pratt. “Be happy you have jobs in a depression.”

“I have no job,” hollered Rulick. “I tried to organize a union that would be fair to all men, and I was fired. After twenty-five years of service, I was fired. I work like a dog. Me and all these others. We kill ourselves every day mixing the rubber that stinks and burns the eyes, pouring it when it is red-hot, choking on it, smelling it at night. All so we can support our families while you have your great parties and drink the champagne of our sweat.”

Artemus Pratt III stepped toward Rulick. “Listen, you Red bastard. My great-great-grandfather built a fortune here with nothing but his brains. His descendants have had the good sense to build upon it. We believe in free enterprise. We believe in business. We believe in an open shop. We will not let our employees hold an ax over our heads. No union.”

Jackie Ferguson wasn’t paying much attention. He was looking around to see what he could eat. He nudged Billy Rulick, who hadn’t taken his eyes off his father. “Let’s find the food.”