Country of the Bad Wolfes (11 page)

He graduated summa cum laude but was bested by a whisker for valedictorian and so delivered the salutatory address. Then went to work as a legal assistant in the Concord office of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He gained the position through the influence of his best friend and fencing teammate, James Davison Bartlett, son to one of the firm's partners and himself studying toward a legal career. A rakish
sort, Jimmy Bartlett had once sneaked a young prostitute into his dormitory simply to prove he could do it, then was caught as he was trying to sneak her out again. It was one of numerous pranks for which he might have been expelled but for the might of his family name. The Bartletts had landed with the Pilgrims. They were among the first families of New Hampshire—and major benefactors of Dartmouth College. In addition to the builders of the paper mills on which the Bartlett fortune was founded and had continued to expand, the bloodline included a lieutenant governor, a state Supreme Court justice, and a state's attorney general. Jimmy's father, Sebastian, was one of the most highly respected contract lawyers in New England, and his Uncle Elliott was an administrator in the consular service. His mother, Alexandra Davison Bartlett, belonged to a prominent New York family long acquainted with the Sullivan County Van Burens, family of the former president of the United States.

It was the most pleasant spring John Roger had known since boyhood. He fulfilled his office duties with precision and could research and annotate a point of law with utter thoroughness and dispatch. On his own initiative he devised and proposed a simpler but more efficient accounting system for the company, an innovation that earned him a handsome bonus and the partners' unstinting praise. He kept a rented room on boisterous Center Street and gave his weekday evenings to reviewing Coke and Blackstone and other legal texts he'd been absorbing since his freshman year. But on almost every weekend he would be Jimmy's guest at the Bartlett estate on the Merrimack. Except for Jimmy's sister, who was away at school in Exeter, he made the acquaintance of all the Bartletts and enjoyed their company as much as they did his.

He and Jimmy liked to scull on the river, liked to saddle a pair of the thoroughbreds stabled on the grounds and race each other across the meadows. The Bartletts also owned a seaside cottage near Rockport, Massachusetts, and he sometimes went there with Jimmy for holiday stays. They would sail off rocky Cape Ann in the family ketch
Hecuba
. They went for long hikes in the hilly woods. They did much target-shooting with Jimmy's Colt Dragoon. The revolver was a graduation gift from his father, who'd received it from Samuel Colt himself in appreciation for his contractual expertise in establishing the Colt factory in Hartford. It was an imposing weapon, weighing above four pounds and firing a .44-caliber ball that would make hash of a man's heart. “Picture yourself a hundred years ago in command of a militia company armed with the only ones of these in existence,” Jimmy said. “You would've been the lords of the earth.”

Once a week they practiced their swordsmanship, usually with the foils they had competed with at Dartmouth, but sometimes with the cavalry sabers Jimmy's great-grandfather had acquired in the Revolutionary War. The first time John Roger hefted a saber he at once felt its difference from a fencing foil. This was no instrument of sport but a weapon of war. Its very heft evoked mortal menace. It
was made for slashing as well as thrusting and its blade was grooved to allow for easier passage through a torso, for the run of blood. A saber contest called for greater strength and stamina than did rapier fencing, and its proper art entailed fighting with a two-handed grip when necessary. It was easy to get caught up in the flailing zeal of a saber match, and during one heated exchange John Roger inadvertently nicked Jimmy's arm. For a week after, his friend bore the bandaged wound as proudly as a war veteran.

I
n mid-summer they passed their bar examinations, John Roger with ease, Jimmy by the skin of his teeth—a fact in which he seemed to take perverse pride—and they were hired as junior members at Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. To mark the occasion, Sebastian Bartlett invited a host of friends to a Saturday picnic on his riverside lawn, to be followed by a ballroom dance that evening.

The day of the picnic was blessed with ideal weather, the turnout large and in festive spirit. A bandstand had been erected on the lawn and a brass ensemble played gaily through the afternoon. Jimmy's sister, Elizabeth Anne, would not arrive until later in the day, coming by coach from Exeter, where she had been spending the past weeks with friends, following her graduation from the Athenian Female Seminary. Her oil portrait hung on the parlor wall of the Merrimack house and John Roger had often paused to admire it. As pictured, she was truly beautiful. Hair the color of polished copper in green-ribboned ringlets to her bare shoulders, the ribbons matching the color of her eyes. An elegant throat necklaced with pearls. Full lips in a small smile suggestive of some secret amusement. John Roger suspected that the artist may have gilded the lily in gratitude for Mr Bartlett's no-doubt-hefty commission.

Jimmy told him the painting of Lizzie—as he and his father called her, while Mrs Bartlett referred to her by no name but Elizabeth—had been done less than a year before. “You'd never know by that picture what a tomboy she was,” Jimmy said. All through girlhood she had been one for foot-racing, climbing trees, flying kites, chucking stones. She had badgered their father into teaching her to swim at a much younger age than Jimmy had learned, and then pestered Jimmy into instructing her how to sail his gaff-rigged pram. She was a constant fret to their mother, who
was ever upbraiding her to behave herself as a respectable young lady ought. Even though Jimmy and his friends refused to let her join their Adventurers' Club, she persisted in swimming with them in the river. “We all wanted to dunk her,” Jimmy said, “but none of us could catch her. She swims like an otter. I don't care to say how many times she beat me in races. She could beat all of us.”

Their mother thought it unseemly that Lizzie was frisking in the river with the boys, but their father, who was proud of her aquatic superiority, believed it was simple innocent fun. Then came the family's first swim of the summer when she was fourteen and her sodden bathing costume clung to her in startling new ways. “You could see the fruit was getting ripe, if you know what I mean,” Jimmy said. Her evident physical bloom effected an abrupt change in Mr Bartlett's outlook and he told her there would be no more swimming in company with boys. Lizzie alleged not to understand his objection and for days persisted in asking an explanation of him, and he would every time reiterate that it simply wasn't proper. But
how
was it improper, Lizzie would demand to know, and red-faced Mr Bartlett would sputter that she should ask her mother. “She didn't have to ask Mum,” Jimmy said. “Lizzie knew very well what Father was talking about. She was just deviling him for the fun of it. It's how she's always been.”

The same devilment was at the root of what Jimmy called the music scandal. His sister was a fine pianist, trained in the classics, but their parents had been unaware of the bohemian element in her repertoire until one evening when she was entertaining the family after supper and segued from “Für Elise” into a rousing dance-hall number of recent French import. Jimmy had heard her play the bawdy music once before, when their parents were away from the house, and had cautioned her against it, and she'd shown him her tongue in retort. But as he'd warned, their mother was dismayed by the lewd composition and she ordered Lizzie to desist from it at once. Very well, the girl said, and banged the fallboard over the keys and got up from the bench and—
humming
the sprightly tune—danced about the parlor with her skirts swirling to her knees. “Mum barely spoke to her for the next couple of days,” Jimmy said.

Mrs Bartlett was finally pushed past her wit's end with her audacious daughter when the girl was seen mounted astride her stallion as she rode on the public road flanking their property. When Lizzie countered her mother's angry reprimand with the contention that it was the more sensible as well as more comfortable way to ride, Mrs Bartlett called upon Mr Bartlett to prohibit her from riding until she promised to do so in the proper, sidesaddle fashion. Lizzie was so cross, Jimmy said, that she threatened to run away and live among the Indians. Her parents never knew for sure when she was joking, but such impertinence was anyway the concluding proof to Mrs Bartlett that the girl was in critical need of social remediation before it was too late. “Do something, Sebastian,” she told her husband.

Mr Bartlett dismissed Lizzie's private tutors and enrolled her at the Athenian
Seminary for her final year of schooling. Renowned for its instruction in the social graces as much as for its rigorous academic curriculum, the institution had molded more than one recalcitrant miss into a decorous young lady. When Elizabeth came home for Christmas holiday at the end of her first semester, she comported herself as the very model of refined femininity her mother had prayed for.

“That's when she sat for that picture on the wall,” Jimmy said.

And now, as John Roger and Jimmy stood talking on the riverside lawn, Mrs Bartlett came up behind them, saying, “John, dear, here is someone you must meet.” The happy matron was hugging the arm of the young woman she presented as her daughter, Elizabeth. In the dusky gold light of late afternoon the girl was smiling at him as in the painting. She was surprisingly tall, her eyes almost on a level with his, and both leaner and more buxom than her portrait suggested. He thought her even lovelier than her picture, and only by force of will kept his jaw from going slack.

“Mr Wolfe,” she said, offering her hand, “Jimmy has written me so much about you, I feel as though we've long been acquainted.”

He said the pleasure was entirely his and kissed her hand. Her eyes went brighter. Her mother tittered.

Before the end of their first dance that evening he knew he was in love, though she would later say that he may not have known it until then but she knew he had fallen in love the minute their eyes met. Directly on the heels of his dancefloor insight, however, he had the distressing thought that she might already have a beau—or worse, be betrothed. He could not muster the boldness to ask directly if she were spoken for, and as they waltzed about the floor he was frantic for some clever way to find out.

His worry was more evident than he knew, and she intuited its cause. “If it's of concern to anyone you know, Mr Wolfe,” she said during a dance, “I'm under no obligation to any party whatever.” He flushed in surprise at both her acuity and her candor. His relief was so manifest she nearly laughed aloud—and so endearing she had to resist the urge to kiss him right there on the dance floor.

Later in the evening they went out to the garden under an oblong ivory moon and followed a winding pathway to a low rock wall bordering the lawn. A mild breeze carried the scents of night flowers and the river, stirring the trees, swaying the shadows. The ballroom music was faint at this distance. Against the house lights filtering through the foliage she was mostly silhouette. An undulant wisp of moonlight played on her hair and glinted on an earring. He said he had heard many an interesting tale of her rowdy tomboy days with the gents of the Adventurers' Club.

“Oh, those rascals,” she said. “They never did let me be a member, you know.” She leaned closer and said in lowered voice, “But that club was never so interesting as
the one I belong to at the seminary. It's a most clandestine association, so I mustn't tell you anything of it unless you promise absolutely never to repeat it to a living soul.”