• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5132 0

ran into the rain. When Mother saw them she dropped to her knees. In a moment the four were together, hugging and admonishing and laughing; Mother laughed and cried at the same time with the rain pouring down her face. Where were you, she said, where were you. Didn’t you hear us call? Tateh had lifted his daughter to hold her in his arms. Gottzudanken, said the Baron. Gottzudanken. They walked back along the beach in this rain and light, happy, huddled all together, soaking wet. Tateh could not help but notice how Mother’s white dress and underclothes lay against her so that ellipses of flesh pressed through. She looked so young with her hair down on her shoulders and matted around her head. Her skirts stuck to her limbs and every few moments she would bend to pluck them away from her body and the wind would blow them back against her. When they had discovered that the children were missing they had run down to the beach and she had removed her shoes at the bottom of the boardwalk stairs and held his arm for support. She walked with her arms around the children. He recognized in her wet form the ample woman in the Winslow Homer painting who is being rescued from the sea by towline. Who would not risk his life for such a woman? But she was pointing to the horizon: a lead of blue sky had opened over the ocean. Suddenly Tateh ran ahead of them all and did a somersault. He did a cartwheel. He stood on his hands in the sand and walked upside down. The children laughed.

Father slept through the incident. He was unable to sleep at night lately and had begun to nap in the afternoons. He was restless. He had read in the newspaper of the growing movement in the Congress for a national tax on income. This was his first presentiment of the end of summer. He took to making regular telephone calls to his manager at the plant in New Rochelle. Things were quiet at home. Nothing more had been heard from the black killer. Business was holding up as he would know from the copies of the orders sent out to him every day. None of this put him at ease. He was becoming bored by the beach and no longer cared to bathe in the ocean. In the evenings before bed he went to the game room and practiced billiards. How could they resume their lives if they remained in Atlantic City? Some mornings he awoke and felt that time and events had gone on and left him more vulnerable than ever. He found their new friend, the Baron, a momentary distraction. Mother thought he was endearing but he felt no special sympathy from him or for him. He wanted to pack up and leave but was constrained by Mother’s security in the place. Here she believed it might be possible to wait for the Coalhouse tragedy to conclude itself and hope it could be outlasted. He knew this was an illusion. To the consternation of the hôtelier she had taken to having the brown child at her table in the dining room. Father gazed at the little boy with grim propriety. At breakfast the morning after the rainstorm he opened the newspaper and found on the front page a picture of the father. Coalhouse’s gang had broken into one of the city’s most celebrated depositories of art, Pierpont Morgan’s library on 36th Street. They had barricaded themselves inside and commanded the authorities to negotiate with them or risk having the Morgan treasures destroyed. They had thrown a grenade into the street to demonstrate the capacity of their armaments. Father crushed the paper in his hands. An hour later he was paged to the telephone for a call from the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan. That afternoon, borne by Mother’s anxious good wishes, he climbed aboard the train for New York.

35

Even to someone who had followed the case from its beginning, Coalhouse’s strategy of vengeance must have seemed the final proof of his insanity. By what other standard could the craven and miserable Willie Conklin, a bigot so ordinary as to be like all men, become Pierpont Morgan, the most important individual of his time? With eight people dead by Coalhouse’s hand, horses destroyed and buildings demolished, with