Country of the Bad Wolfes

DARTMOUTH DAYS

John Roger had not really expected Samuel Thomas to post a letter to him from every port as he had promised, but as winter gave way to the first muddy thaw of spring he was sorely disappointed not to have received even a note from him in the six months since they’d last seen each other. He was expecting him to appear in Hanover any day now, perhaps with explanation for his lack of correspondence, perhaps with no reference to it whatever. In either case, he knew his brother would be smiling and full of confidence and have stories to tell, and knew that his pique toward Samuel Thomas would not withstand the pleasure of seeing him again.

Then the trees were greening and beginning to bloom, and he completed his freshman final examinations—and still there was no word from Samuel Thomas. And now he began to be worried.

He wrote to the Portsmouth harbormaster’s office, inquiring after the Atropos, and was informed the ship had been delayed on its return voyage, incurring damage in a storm off Cape Hatteras. The vessel had been under repair for weeks before again setting sail, and it was now due to make Portsmouth in the middle of June. John Roger was relieved but also vexed. How much effort would it have taken for Samuel Thomas to write him a note about the delay? He had planned on going to Portsmouth to greet him at the dock but now thought he might rather accept the invitation of some college friends to spend a few weeks in Boston. Let that thoughtless blockhead do a little worrying of his own when he didn’t find him in Hanover.

But on the sunny afternoon the Atropos landed in Portsmouth, John Roger was there to meet the ship. And found out from one of its officers that Samuel T Wolfe was not among the crew and had in fact not reported for duty before the ship left Portsmouth in August. All John Roger could think to say was, “I see.”

He walked along the waterfront for a time without a coherent thought, then halted and looked about him like a roused sleepwalker. Then made directly for the Yardarm Inn where he and Sammy had quartered the previous summer. The desk man consulted a register and said that a Samuel Wolfe had been living there at the end of August, all right, but had quit the premises in debt of a day’s rent. The date of his arrears coincided with John Roger’s departure for Hanover. If he’d left any possessions they had been sold or discarded.

John Roger then went to the office of the city graveyard and pored over its registries. Then to the local hospital, where an administrator carefully examined its record of patients. In none of those pages was entered his brother’s name. Over the next weeks he went to every jail and prison fifty miles to the north and south of Portsmouth. In Boston the jail clerk ran his finger down the inmate ledger and stopped at a name and looked at it more closely. “Ah yah,” he said, “Samuel Wolfe, right here he is. And don’t I remember him now?” He peered over the rims of his spectacles at John Roger, whose pulse sped. “But grayhaired he was and black in the teeth with his sixty years and more, so I don’t suppose he was your brother, now was he?” John Roger said, “Damn it!”—and received a severe look and stern reminder that he was in a Boston municipal office and not in some waterfront public house and such profanity could get him ten days in one of the cells down the hall.

He was at breakfast in a café when it occurred to him that Samuel Thomas may have contracted amnesia by some means and be wandering about with no inkling of his own identity. Perhaps right there in Boston. For the next three days he scoured the city streets before conceding the impossible odds of finding him by this haphazard means. Then admitted the desperate foolishness of thinking Sammy could be amnestic. Unable to think of what else he might do, he returned to Hanover.

He lived in a small and Spartan room near the campus, his scholarship not providing for dormitory lodging. He lay awake deep into the nights, his imagination amok and returning again and again to the grim possibility that Samuel Thomas had been killed in some hideous accident or taken fatally ill, his unidentified remains consigned to a pauper’s grave. Or had been murdered while being robbed, or in some street affray, and his body pitched into the river or the sea or the city refuse pit to be burned with the waste. He could conceive of no other explanations for his brother’s disappearance and lack of communication. He spent part of every day staring at their graduation picture.

The summer was waning into its last weeks when he awoke one morning with the sure conviction that Samuel Thomas was dead, and that he may have been dead since their first night apart. Dead all that time that he had so blithely thought of him as alive. He could hardly draw breath against the crushing sensation of his loss, his overwhelming aloneness. “Oh God, Sammy!” he said. Then wept with such force he ruptured a blood vessel in his throat. Which became infected, then worsened, then prostrated him with a raging fever.

He had not come out of his room for three days when his landlady, Mrs Burrows, who had doted on him through his freshman year, became concerned. She tapped at his door and asked if all was well. Then knocked louder but still received no reply. And so let herself into the shadowy quarters and discovered him abed and barely conscious, stewing in his own filth, unable to speak for the burning rawness of his throat.

“Merciful Jesus.” She hastened to give him water, then opened the windows to air the room. Then cleaned him and dressed him in fresh nightclothes and helped him to sit in a chair so that she could change his bedding. Then fetched him a measure of whiskey and told him to sip it slowly. His eyes flooded at the burn of it.

Over the next week she several times a day gave him spoonings of various nostrums. Each morning she changed his bedding and bore away his slops, then brought a breakfast of honeyed tea and parboiled eggs and soft breads. She brought dinners of mashed and buttered vegetables, supper broths of mutton and beef. In the first low raspings of his returning voice he told her of the recent notification that his brother, the last of his living kin, had been lost at sea. Her commiseration was tearful. She well knew the pain of losing loved ones, the loneliness of being without family. She had buried her only child, a month-old daughter, twenty-three years ago, and it was eighteen years now she had been widowed.

He was physically recovered by the beginning of the academic year, though his voice had been permanently deepened to a raspy bass. His emotional recuperation took a while longer, but nothing else could have served it so well as the resumption of university life. His freshman year had been a notable triumph—he’d made the dean’s list both semesters, and his essay on the merits of Hamiltonian economics was published in a university review.

His successes continued through the rest of his student years. He studied Spanish in ancillary courses and while still a sophomore became fluent enough to read Don Quixote in the original and write a monograph on it in Spanish. He had always enjoyed numbers but in college they became a passion and he dazzled his instructors in mathematics. Accounting was child’s play. His studies came to him with such ease that he had time for extracurricular pursuits. He joined the debate club and became a redoubtable adversary, winning the annual New England competition with a rousing defense of President Polk’s war in Mexico as essential to America’s Manifest Destiny. At the urging of a professor who admired his forensic flair, he auditioned for a junior-year production of Henry the Fourth and won praise for his rendition of Hotspur, and then as a senior he played the lead in Marlowe’s Faustus. On a dare, he enrolled in a fencing class and was as surprised as everyone else by his swiftly acquired proficiency with a foil. His style was unaggressive and lacked finesse but was marked by an impenetrable defense, relying on clockwork parries that inevitably frustrated his opponents into rash moves that left them open to counterthrust hits. He was recruited for the varsity team and within a year became its ace. In his junior year he was narrowly defeated by his Princeton opponent in the interscholastic finals, and then as a senior he beat the Brown University ace for the championship.

All the while, through careful observation of his classmates, he learned the bearing of a gentleman. In emulation of his favorite professor he took up smoking a calabash pipe. He was popular among his fellows, a convivial companion who relished political argument and an occasional wager on a horse race, who enjoyed a pint and a ribald joke as well as the next man.

And yet, for all his friends, he did not truly confide in any of them. He was amiably chary in all reference to family. The adventurous sire he’d admired as a boy had become a secret to guard against the social exclusion he was sure would befall him were it known he was son to a murderer. As far as anyone at Dartmouth knew, his parents had died when he was a young child and he and his brother had been raised in Portsmouth by a maiden aunt, the aunt now also deceased. He had admitted to a living brother only because he had expected Samuel Thomas sooner or later to show up in search of him, and he would have to introduce him to friends. He had told them Sammy was a junior officer on a merchant ship, an elevation in rank he was certain Sammy would enjoy simulating, just as he would surely understand why his classmates mustn’t know the truth about their father—though Sammy would doubtless have chivvied him for his social fastidiousness. He had been sure, too, that his friends would enjoy the surprise of seeing that they were twins. When he sadly told his fellows, at the start of sophomore year, that his brother’s ship had gone down in a storm off Hispaniola that summer and the entire crew with it, he was accorded the special sympathy reserved for those who have lost the last of their family.

His only confidant during his Dartmouth years was a leatherbound ledger that served as a journal in which he made random entries with no purpose but to clarify to himself his own thoughts and reflections. Whenever he was unclear about some idea or emotion, uncertain in his perception of someone or vague about a memory, he sat to his journal and wrote as precisely as he could what he thought or felt or remembered, and thereby gave those thoughts and feelings and memories the solidity and authority of words recorded on a page. And by that simple act made of them his abiding truth.

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.