William Lashner - Bitter Truth

December 11, 1911

Father remains in New York, on business, as we continue to prepare for the holidays. Christian is staying north to study and so it will be lonely and gray here. I miss him, I miss him, I miss him terribly, but still I will do what I must to maintain the gay facade. While searching for the ornaments for our tree, I found myself in Father’s library. I remembered then the secret hideaway in the paneling he showed us when we were girls and Father had just bought the house from the Ritters after they had lost all their money. I seemed to recall it was on one side or the other of the cast-iron fireplace. On a spur, I wondered if I could find it again. Behind which of the dark sheets of mahogany did the secret place lurk? It took almost an hour of rapping my knuckles on the wood and looking for imperfections in the lines, but I found it at last. My heart leaped when I slipped up the piece of wood trim and spun open the panel. Inside was not the ornaments I had sought, or even private treasures, only books, ledgers, old accounting journals. How very boring a discovery for such a secret place. Someday maybe I will look inside these books and see why Father has hidden them away, but for now I am still wondering about the ornaments .

January 12, 1912

My love’s letters become more desperate. All our hopes seem on the verge of collapse. He talks of using his engineering training and joining Mr. Goethals’s endeavor in Panama, hoping somehow to find in the wilds of Central America the fortune that will save his family. They are dying in droves from malaria and other foul diseases in Panama. The thought of my love suffering in that far-off wilderness drives a stake of fear through my heart. It is time, somehow, to bring to fruition the plans I made last fall and to forestall the coming tragedy. I don’t know if I am capable of doing what must be done, but what I have learned in the past weeks provides a peculiar strength that I had never felt before. I must keep reminding myself that I am my father’s daughter and whatever power it was he could muster in pursuit of his deepest desire, I can muster the same dark power in pursuit of my own .

January 20, 1912

My father was at his desk in the library, working on his figures, when I approached with my crucial errand. A fire was blazing in the cast-iron fireplace off to the side, but still the room was cold. All my life I had come into that room with the low bookshelves and mahogany paneling and the red flock wallpaper and asked him for things and always he had granted my requests, a new toy, a new dress, a party to liven up the spring. He had spoiled us, never denied us a thing, and I had always thought of that room as a generous place where dreams were fulfilled, but I realized now, for perhaps the first time, that in this room of business, where so many of my own shallow dreams had been made reality, others’ dreams had been crushed by the power of my father’s wealth. For the first time, this day, I knew what it was to fear my father. But from necessity I pushed that fear far from my heart and twisted my lips into a smile. I stopped perhaps ten feet from his desk and waited for him to raise his head and acknowledge me. Those few seconds seemed to me then to be an eternity. “Come here, daughter,” he said when he noticed me there. “How can I please you this evening?”

“I’ve come today, Father,” I said, “to talk of business.”

It did not take long to explain the dire situation facing the Shaw Brothers Company and when I finished my father stared out at me with eyes I had never seen in him before. They were cold, and black, and full of ugly calculation. Looking at those eyes, the business eyes of my father, and comparing them to the sweet blue lenses of my Christian, I fell, for the moment, though I am loath to admit it, out of love with my father. But we are blood and bone, my father and I, a match for one another. I know now all he was capable of in pursuit of his fortune; I am still learning the depths of my own formidable capabilities .

He didn’t reject the proposition right off. Instead he had questions, questions about the books, the assets and liabilities, the market and the market share, the equity positions of the varying parties, all questions I wouldn’t and couldn’t answer. Those questions, I told him, would have to be taken up with the principals. Finally, my father asked the last, most important, question .

“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I responded .

My father’s cold ugly eyes didn’t so much as flinch .

“And without this money the banks will close the company and sell the store?” asked my father .

“That is what I have been told,” I said .

“And you want me to provide this company with the capital needed to survive its most current crises?” asked my father .

“You must,” I said. “You simply must.”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a substantial sum of money, daughter,” he said .

“Consider it,” I said, “my dowry.”

My father stared at me for a moment more and then dropped his head back to the figures in the ledgers before him. I didn’t know whether to stay or to flee, but this was too important to leave without an answer and so, despite my faltering heart, I waited, shivering, while he wrote in the ledgers. Finally he said, without an ounce of warmth, as if he were addressing an employee, “You may go.”

“Not without an answer,” I said, my voice trembling as I said it .

Without looking up from his ledgers, my father said, “I will make appropriate arrangements to provide the capital.”

Oh happy happy happy day! The fondest plans of my soul have been realized. I am in awe of the Lord’s grand designs, that something so base and awful, something derived by such means, can be used to purchase an unearthly paradise. Just as Jesus turned water to wine He has turned my father’s black wealth into a love so pure and a happiness so deep that it acts as praise itself for His beneficence. That my father made me beg and wait I shan’t hold against him; I understand him completely, we are of the same coin. But today is a day for happiness, for joy, for love. My Christian, my Christian, my Christian, forever, my love, we drink together from the cup of joy held in the very hand of grace .

March 29, 1912

I am puzzled by the reactions of my sisters to our glorious news. When father announced the engagement at dinner tonight I had worried that Hope would be distraught. I feared her reaction upon learning that her sister, two years younger than she, was to be married while she was still without a suitor, but Hope seemed genuinely pleased at my good fortune. I have forgiven her the earlier remarks about Christian, they were of course figments of a natural jealousy, and take her wishes for my future to be of the utmost sincerity. It is Charity whose face turned dark when she heard the announcement and unaccountably bolted from the room .

It was a rather gay dinner before that moment; I haven’t spent a less than gay moment since Christian’s arrival on the train from New Haven and his proposal. The last of the Shaw Brothers, after whom the store is named, Christian’s Uncle Sullivan, was at the dinner, as were Christians’ four cousins, with all assorted wives and children, a regular convocation of Shaws. It was a group that I don’t believe would have deigned to enter our house just a few years before, but all that now has changed. The dinner had been called to celebrate the resurrection of the fortunes of the Shaw Brothers Company, of which my father is to be a majority partner, once the lawyers finish the appropriate paperwork. A fire was burning in the blue and white marble fireplace and the squab was a crisp delight. Father brought his best wine from the cellar and there were generally good feelings all around at the new arrangement. I must say that Uncle Sullivan is more dour a man than I had been led to believe, though Christian attributed his mood to weariness at dealing with the difficulties that preceded this proud new venture. It is beyond my understanding how he could think my father is anything other than a saint for agreeing to provide the needed money and sign onto all their shaky notes in order to save the company, but the world of business, I have been taught, is by necessity rather cruel and ungrateful. It was during a speech toasting the new partnership that father announced our engagement. There were a few exclamations of joy and then general applause and I felt the admiration flow about me like the waters of a joyous bath. And then it was that Charity fled the room .