Power (8 page)

But then, I am a woman, and I think that we differ from men in our acceptance of the plausibility of a good many truths, not one, unshakable and single answer to any question. So I can write a little about Benjamin Renwell Holt as I knew him; not that I claim to know him so much better than anyone else did, but I did know him in one way that no one else had the opportunity to know him.

And about the old days—they are surprisingly clear to me now. They say that when you grow old, those areas of the brain which deal with the memories of youth grow most perceptive. Forty years past is clear and bright, while last week becomes muggy. Do you find it so? Or perhaps it is being back here in Father's house, where I was born and where I hope to spend the rest of my days, that makes those old times so vivid.

 

2

I began the letter to you, dear Alvin, yesterday, and then I put it aside, and a day intervened before I could come back to it. I had all of Ben's personal letters and notes crated and shipped from Washington to Ringman, but it took a long time with two of those bright and eager young men on the research staff of the union going through the material and separating what, as they felt, properly belonged in the union's archives or in the Library of Congress. The results of their labor arrived yesterday, five large crates of material. I attempted to deal with it, but it defeats me, and I am of a mind to bestow all of it on the public library here. That would be a sensible place for it, a proper place. And I like the thought of interested people going to our library for information about Ben's life—not the same one-room cottage free library he went to as a boy, but still the same library in continuation.

So there is a problem solved, and isn't it true that at our age, most problems are relatively easy of solution? It's the problems of youth that are vast and terrible and overwhelming. You know, it was such a problem that brought Ben to our house here in Ringman for the first time—yes, the first time I saw him. Or at least I think so. Ringman, then—it was September of 1914, just forty-four years ago—was not a very large town, less than twenty thousand people, as I remember, so I may well have seen Ben Holt before he came to our house. Being an only and motherless child, I was at boarding school and finishing school for my education but my summers were spent here, and I certainly could have seen him many times. But not seen him to know him and look and remember; that happened when he came to our house.

Mrs. Privit was our housekeeper then, already aging and slow on her feet, and I ran past her to open the door. I was expecting my cousin, Jimmy Aimesley—he died in France in 1918, poor fellow—who was coming for a few days, and I wanted to greet him myself. But when I flung open the door, there, instead of my Cousin Jimmy, was Ben Holt.

“Is that Mr. Holt? And if it is, your father is expecting him, Dorothy, so ask him to come in!” Mrs. Privit called out to me, but I was speechless and neither asked him to come in nor to remain there on our doorstep, only staring at him. You see, it was a different time than this one, a different age, and I don't suppose there was a properly raised young woman like myself who didn't wait from day to day for the man she dreamed of to walk into her life. How she knew, I can't say; but I knew. I knew it would be a young giant, like this one, with eyes of sparkling blue and brown hair in a great rumpled mass that he tried to comb, but so unsuccessfully, and a mass of arm and shoulder to fill the whole doorway, and his cap in his big hands, held nervously and turned round and round nervously; and afterwards he said that all he saw was my open mouth and my own wide eyes staring at him and making him feel what he already suspected, that he was a sort of a freak, badly dressed, badly groomed, at the front entrance of a rich, great house where he had no business being.

“Well, Dorothy, is it Mr. Holt or isn't it?” Mrs. Privit called.

“I'm Mr. Holt,” he said, confirming my hope that his voice would be rich and deep. “I have an appointment with Mr. Aimesley.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” I managed to say, and then, at once and together, I realized that he was a miner, his hands ingrained with coal dirt, his fingernails cracked and broken, his neck skin lined with the black net of his trade, his suit too small for him, and himself no fairy-tale prince but one of the men of the Ringman Pits; and I thought my heart would break with the dream shattered as quickly as it came into being. I let him into the house, closed the door behind him, and then ran upstairs to my bedroom, ashamed of myself for opening my heart to him—whether he knew or not—and giving my precious accolade to someone like himself. Mrs. Privit said afterwards that I had behaved strangely and badly, and discourteously too, and she was absolutely right. Although she knew as little as Ben Holt what had happened to me when I first opened the door.

In those old houses, privacy was always modified by an air vent, and my father's study was directly under my bedroom. I was mortified and dismissed Ben Holt from my life as expeditiously as I had taken him into it; but curiosity was ever my weak point, and I had to know what this great, oversized coal miner had to do with my father. I opened the vent and listened.

Ben had come out of the University of Pennsylvania the previous spring. You know the story of what that meant to him, what he went through and what his mother went through for Ben to have that degree. Today, going to a college, even for a coal miner's son, is matter of fact, not a miracle; but my father knew a miracle then and accepted miracles with the grave and thoughtful wonder of a man who regards his species each new day as if it were a newly created miracle. So the spread of silence when I opened that vent must have been occupied by my father looking at Ben, studying him with interest and respect, and smiling that slow, warm smile of his, until he said,

“Sit down, Ben, won't you. You don't mind if I call you Ben?”

“No, sir, Mr. Aimesley.”

“I do it as a matter of seniority, not as a point in class relations. I make that plain, because our conversation here will not be fruitful if I give any impression of patronizing you. Do you have any notion that I am patronizing you?”

“Not yet, sir.” The reply came after a moment of hesitation, and there was the note of a smile in his voice. I wanted to see him smile and felt cheated.

“Tell me when it occurs,” my father said flatly. “Do you smoke?”

“On occasion, sir.”

“Then you don't mind if I do?”

“No, sir.”

“All right, Ben.” Silence as my father lit his cigar and took the two or three puffs that established his pleasure. “First, I want to thank you for coming here. A miner's Sunday is precious.”

“I was glad to come, Mr. Aimesley.”

“Good. Have you any idea why I sent for you?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. We'll come to that. First of all, I know something about you. Ten years ago, I represented your father and the other miners who died in the Ringman Massacre, as it's called. The settlement was small enough, shamefully small, but at least it was something.”

“I know that. I've been grateful.”

“For what? No, don't say things because they sound right, Ben. You were not grateful—you were as bitter as the others, and with reason. I'm not a labor lawyer. I should have done better; I should have known more, stood on firmer ground. Well, that's done. The point is, I've watched you. It's news when a miner's son fights his way into the university, and more news when he does it without a father's help. I don't have to tell you what you did. You know what you did, better than I can ever know. Your mother passed away recently, didn't she?”

“Two months ago.”

“And that left you alone, didn't it?”

“I have no brothers or sisters, if that's what you mean. I have relatives here in Ringman—”

“That's what I meant,” my father said. “You have aunts and uncles, but you prefer to board with Mrs. Tarragon.”

“What did you do, sir? Have me investigated?”

“Simpler than that,” my father laughed. “I asked a few questions. Tell me something, Ben—why did you go back to the mines?”

“I'm a miner.”

“That's a statement of condition, not a reason.”

“I have my reasons, Mr. Aimesley.”

“But you prefer to keep them to yourself. You resent the rich lawyer who puts his nose into your affairs, and you think that none of it is any of his damn business.”

There was a stretch of silence. Deliberately, my father had provoked Ben Holt, and now Ben was weighing the provocation, studying my father, and trying to gauge direction and meaning. I didn't have to see this to know it; I knew my father, and in some strange way, I seemed to know Ben Holt—just a little.

“No, sir,” Ben said. “I guess your business is whatever you choose to make your business. But we live in Ringman. You are Joseph Aimesley, and this is the Aimesley house, and I'm a digger out at the pits.”

“And never the twain shall meet?”

“Something of that sort, Mr. Aimesley.”

“The hell with that!” my father snorted. “Don't talk to me about class or pride, Ben. I've lived my life in Ringman as well as you, and for a little longer, and I've bucked this damn miner pride until my head is sore. Don't tell me about pride. If they gave classes in it, there's no one but a coal miner fit to teach it. I'm not hiding anything. If I seem periphrastic, it's only because I am attempting to avoid offense to that pride of yours. Now to get down to facts. While you were still at the University of Pennsylvania, you received an offer to read law with the firm of Lee, Cadwallader and Seely in Pittsburgh. Am I right? No. I don't spy on you. It just happens that Arthur Lee is my brother-in-law. I wrote to the university for your record and sent it to him and suggested that he make the offer to you.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because if you are avaricious for gold and you hear about a nugget buried somewhere, you will go and dig it up. Let us say that I am avaricious for human intelligence. Does that make sense to you?”

“Well, sir—yes. In a way.”

“But you turned down Arthur Lee. Why?”

The silence stretched again, and my father let it stretch. He would be lighting his cigar again, I decided, and regarding Ben Holt moodily, as he so often regarded me. When Ben answered him, his voice was so soft that I had to strain to hear.

“I had two brothers, sir.”

“Oh? I didn't know that, Ben.”

“Daniel, fourteen years older than I. Franklin, fifteen years older.”

“What happened to them, Ben?”

“The Harkness cave-in. Eighteen ninety-nine. It's forgotten by now. They worked together, as a team.”

“I see.”

“Well, that was a good offer from Pittsburgh. I'm very grateful to you for thinking of me, Mr. Aimesley.”

“I wish it wouldn't end there, Ben. A lawyer is well armed. You can do a lot as a lawyer, Ben.”

“Yes, sir. I know that. But first I have to figure out what I want to do.”

 

3

So my letter to you, dear Alvin, goes on and on. I put it aside yesterday, and later that evening I rummaged through the drawers of my old bedroom chest. Father never changed my room, never got rid of anything, and there in a drawer I found the diary I had kept for three years, from the age of fourteen to the age of seventeen. So you see that I was a very usual young lady who kept a diary during just those years when a girl is expected to. It continues up to a point, and my point was the day I met Ben Holt. Late at night on that day, I made the following entry:

Today I met a divine, awful young man. His name is much more exalted than he is, since he is only a coal miner. His name is Benjamin Renwell Holt, and he has caused me nothing but trouble, so I hope I will never see him again and that Father forgets the whole thing. Cousin Jimmy also arrived.

That was the last entry I ever made in the diary. Can it be that when you first touch the manner and meaning of your existence, a teen-age diary is put aside? Anyway, during dinner, my Cousin Jimmy Aimesley said something about Ben Holt. He had arrived as Ben was leaving, and Father introduced them. I remember that Jimmy was terribly impressed with Ben's size, bearing, and a certain quality of magnetism so striking in Ben, and he mentioned this. Jimmy was small and underweight, and had always admired and envied big men.

“I don't think he's anything to admire,” I said.

My father raised his brows. “Then you know him, Dorothy?”

“No, I only opened the door for him.”

“But you know he's no one to admire,” my father went on. I think I was forewarned; I knew that tone of my father's; but I had to go on and hit out somehow against Ben, I couldn't stop, and I said,

“He's just a miner, but even a miner's hands and neck could be clean when he comes calling on Sunday.”

Father's face clouded, but he would never allow an argument during dinner. “That's enough, Dorothy,” he said quietly. “We'll discuss this later.”

After dinner, Father gave Jimmy a copy of Mr. Jerome's
Three Men in a Boat
, an old favorite of his which, he felt, would amuse Jimmy and improve his outlook on the world, and motioned me to follow him into his study. Poor Jimmy was no great prize, but to be marched off like this on his first night with us was almost more than I could bear, and in the study, I stared at Father morosely.

Bluntly, with no moral precepts to introduce the matter, Father said, “We'll stick to the facts, Dorothy. They are more enlightening than speculations on egalitarianism. You feel a personal affront in the fact that Mr. Holt did not remove the signs of his trade before he came calling here.”

“It is Sunday. He could have washed.”

“I've raised you poorly,” Father sighed, “but we'll let that go by the board for the moment. How the hell do you know that he didn't wash?”