Benedict Hall Page 7

  The model was made of balsa wood and paper, neatly painted with the company name and the letters C742K on the tail. Frank picked it up in his hand, and turned it to see how the propeller was attached. He lifted it to look at the angle of the wings and the proportion of the tail to the body. He itched to take the propeller off to get a look at the pitch of the blades. He peered at them, bringing the model close to his eyes. “Is this a scale model?”

  “More or less. This is based on one of the mail planes, but I’m working on a prototype. You can see we’re trying the Stearman wings.”

  “I do. What degree of pitch do you use? This looks a lot like a boat propeller.”

  “You’re right. Our sea sled uses it, too.” Boeing leaned forward, and pointed to the propeller housing. “We’re trying to reduce vibration. Some of our contracts aren’t our own design—there’s the de Havilland, and the army wants an armored triplane—but we think we can do better starting from the ground up.”

  “How thick is the skin?” Frank rotated the model. “And the payload? The range?”

  For half an hour they discussed the pros and cons of two wings over three. When the receptionist knocked on the door and came in with a coffee service, Frank looked up in surprise. He had all but forgotten where he was and why he was here.

  The young woman laid the tray on the corner of the desk and left the office. Boeing poured coffee, and handed Frank a cup. He shoved the creamer forward so Frank could reach it. “So, Major. I gather you’re available now? I can offer you a hundred a month. I know it’s not much, but if things go well with the B-1, things will look up.”

  Frank’s fingers suddenly began to tremble. With care, he set the coffee cup down. “Sir—don’t you want to interview me?”

  Boeing gave a cheery grin. “Why, son, we just had an interview!”

  “Oh, but I—we were just—”

  Boeing took a great slurp of hot coffee, and banged his cup down with a rush of boyish enthusiasm that belied his professorial appearance. “Major, all that matters to me in the world are airplanes! We’ve had to build furniture and flat-bottomed boats and God knows what-all since the war ended. But what I want to do is this!” He pointed to the model again. “I believe you’re the man to help me, and I think my chief engineer will agree.” He picked up his cup again, and rose to walk to the window. He pointed his thumb at the city beyond the glass. “We’re going to put Seattle on the map, Major, and not just for boats. When people around the country—no, around the world—think of Seattle, I want them to think of airplanes. Boeing airplanes.”

  Frank rose, too, and went to stand beside the older man to look down on the street below. “As many automobiles as wagons down there now,” he said.

  Boeing chuckled. “Exactly. Good man.” He clapped Frank’s shoulder, then pointed to a framed clipping on the wall above his desk. “That article is from Scientific American. Ten years ago. It says that ‘to affirm that the airplane is going to revolutionize the future is to be guilty of the wildest exaggeration.’ ”

  “The revolution of the future already started,” Frank said. “With warfare.”

  “Right you are,” Boeing said. He polished off his coffee with a toss of his head, then shook one long forefinger at Frank. “Mark my words, son. One day no one will think anything of buying passage on an airplane when they want to travel.”

  He sat down again behind his desk, and leaned back so he could look into Frank’s face. “So. Are you going to join the Boeing Airplane Company, Major?”

  Frank’s heart beat so hard he thought it must show through his coat. He managed to say, with reasonable calm, “Yes, sir. Yes. I would be pleased to join you, if you’ll have me. Your vision of the future—that’s exciting.”

  Boeing grinned again, and reached for the candlestick telephone on his desk. “I have to call Dickson Benedict and thank him for recommending you. I think you’ll be a great fit.” He spoke to the telephone operator, then cradled the earpiece against his chest while he waited for the connection. “How long have you known the Benedict family?”

  The sidewalk felt like air beneath Frank’s feet as he walked back to his hotel. He could hardly believe the swift change in his fortunes.

  Dickson Benedict’s name had opened three doors for him. Only one of the businesses had asked if he made his drawings before or after the war, a polite way of asking if he could draw one-handed. He assured the man he had prepared his portfolio while he was at the hospital in Virginia, but there had been no job offer. The second business had shown interest, but the salary they mentioned was substantially lower than the one Bill Boeing had tossed off so casually.

  More than that, Frank knew in his bones that Boeing was right. Roads needed to be built, and ships, too. But air transport would outshine them all one day. It would be faster, more efficient. A man could soon reach New York from Seattle in a couple of days, instead of the week it took to get there by train. Frank was willing to bet someone would fly across the Atlantic before long, and maybe even, one day, across the mighty Pacific. The thought of being part of that movement, of contributing to that progress, made him feel youthful again, filled with hope. A swell of returning confidence enlivened his step.

  Now, at last, he could write to his mother and father. He would telephone Dickson Benedict to thank him. Or better yet, go to his office, and shake his hand in person.

  Then he would search out the rooming house Blake had found for him. He had a week to get himself settled before his employment would start. Seattle was to be his new home.

  He felt better than he had for nearly two years. As he walked briskly back to the Alexis, the gray sky above his head felt cozy rather than forbidding. The cool, damp air was soft in his lungs, and the clang of the trolley as it clattered down Madison charmed him. He had a job. He would soon have a place to live. He felt like a man again.

  He should, he thought, shop for a new overcoat. His war was over.

  The doorbell of Benedict Hall sounded its three-tone chime just after one o’clock. All the family was out, and Blake and Hattie and the twins were at lunch in the kitchen. Leona said, “Shall I go, Mr. Blake?”

  Blake laid down his soupspoon, and pushed away from the table. “No, Leona. Thank you, but I’ll get it.” Leona nodded.

  Her sister didn’t lift her eyes from her soup bowl, and Blake frowned to himself as he thrust his arms into his coat sleeves and adjusted his collar. Loena had been glum of late. Usually the sound of the twins chattering filled the kitchen at mealtimes. They tended to do their chores side by side, and their light voices could be heard gossiping as they were cleaning the upper hall, dusting the front room, polishing the long table in the dining room. Blake wondered if they had had a falling out. Or perhaps Loena was ill. He could ask Miss Margot to have a look at her. Dr. Margot, that was.

  He indulged in a private smile of pride as he smoothed the lapels of his jacket. He had always known that girl would be something special.

  The doorbell chimed again, but Blake did not hurry. Whoever this caller was should learn that in a proper house, it took time to answer the door. This was not, after all, a hotel. He paused behind the closed door and cleared his throat before he turned the handle.

  A rather large person stood on the step, thick-featured, with a pendulous belly and big, scarred hands holding the lapels of a well-worn service coat. Blake bent a haughty eye on him, and the man, evidently recovering his manners, snatched off his cap to reveal pale thinning hair. His eyebrows and eyelashes were pale, too, giving him a bleached look.

  “May I help you?” Blake asked.

  “I’m looking for Preston Benedict,” the man said, in the slurred accents of the English working class.

  “Oh, yes?” Blake answered in his most remote tone. “And who is calling, please?”

  The man grinned, showing discolored teeth. “I’m Carter, mate,” he said. “Benjamin Carter. Sergeant, I was. Preston’s batman.”

  Blake drew a slow breath through his nostrils.
Carter didn’t exactly smell bad, but there was something distasteful about him, just the same. He said, with emphasis, “Captain Benedict is not at home. He’s working.”

  Carter gave a crude snort of amusement. “Working! Preston? That’s a good laugh.”

  Blake stiffened. “Pardon me,” he said. This time he sniffed audibly, and he directed his gaze above the man’s head, no longer caring to meet his faded eyes. “Perhaps, Mr. Carter, you will allow me to give Captain Benedict a message?”

  Carter’s laughter died. “No need to turn up your nose at me, mate. I think I know how I should be treated! You may be standing there like a lord, but you’re still a nigger.”

  Blake took a deliberate step back, and shut the door firmly in Benjamin Carter’s face.

  He stood still for a moment, listening to the gutter curses beyond the door, waiting until the angry footfalls fading down the steps of the porch told him the man had given up and left. Then, straightening his jacket and holding his head high, Blake went back to the kitchen. Automatically, he glanced into the rooms he passed, to assure himself everything was in order.

  Hattie looked up when he came back into the kitchen. “Oh,” she breathed. “Lost your temper?” Leona turned a curious gaze on him, too, and even Loena raised her drooping head.

  Hattie knew him too well. Blake tried to relax his rigid face. He took his time removing his jacket, shaking it out, hanging it on its peg beneath the big Sessions clock. He crossed to the counter to pour himself a cup of coffee, then carried it back to the table, pulled out his chair, and sat down.

  “Who was it, Blake?” Hattie asked.

  He blew out a breath, and looked at her with affection. He had known Hattie a long time. She had come to work for the Benedicts more than twenty years ago, and she hadn’t changed much in all that time. Even as a young woman, she had those cushiony cheeks, generous hips, and deep bosom. Her chin was fuller now, her shoulders more rounded, but she had the same broad South Carolina accent she had the first day he met her at King Street Station.

  He wouldn’t tell her what Benjamin Carter had said. There was no need to wound her. This had not been an easy house, but he and Hattie had always been treated with respect. They were as much a part of the family as two Negro retainers could be. Hattie deserved better than to hear the casual insult of an ill-bred limey.

  He sipped from his coffee cup. The brew had gone bitter from sitting in the pot since breakfast. “It was another soldier,” he told Hattie. “An Englishman who was in the war with Mr. Preston.”

  Hearing Preston’s name, Hattie brightened, as she always did. “Lordie, is that right? Is he coming back, then?” She braced herself on the table as she hefted herself out of her chair. “I should make some cookies. Maybe a pie.”

  “I expect he’ll be back,” Blake said. It was probably true. That sort didn’t give up easily.

  Loena and Leona rose, too, and began clearing away the soup bowls and water glasses. Blake sat a moment longer, finishing his coffee, as the twins clattered dishes in the big sink. Hattie took butter and milk from the icebox, and set the range to heat. Blake watched, postponing going out to the garage to try to scrub a spot of oil from the concrete floor.

  He shouldn’t take offense, he knew, at the word Carter had used. Everyone—that is, everyone except the Benedicts—used it. He should accept it as a reminder that, despite everything, he had come to a good position in his life. He was the only one of his family to be born a free man, free to choose his own work, free to tread his own path. His mother had hoped for him to be a businessman or a teacher. But he had worked for Dickson Benedict for more than thirty years, made a good salary, tucked a bit away for his old age. He had a right to be proud.

  Hattie began to cream butter in a pottery bowl, her wide hips swinging as she worked the spoon. The twins put on their aprons and disappeared upstairs with a mop and a bucket of cleaning rags. Blake sat on for a moment, staring at a slice of his own reflection in the nickel finish of the range. At this distance, the bit of his face he could see looked as smooth and unmarked as it had been the day he first met Mr. Dickson.

  He had been twenty-six years old, as old as Mr. Preston was now, but infinitely older than his years. He hadn’t fought the sort of war Preston and Carter and Frank Parrish had fought. His battle had been of a different sort. And it had lasted a lot longer.

  Blake was born in 1866, and his newly freed parents, in gratitude to the President, had named him Abraham. The owner of the plantation—their owner—was one Franklin Blake, of Columbia, South Carolina, and all his slaves bore his name. He was neither worse nor better than other slave owners, as far as Abraham Blake knew. His mother and father were allowed to live together. Their one-room shack stood in a row of such dwellings. None of them had lighting or plumbing or even a window. Abraham’s parents couldn’t read, but they pinned the Emancipation Proclamation on the inner wall of their shack just the same.

  It was after the battle of Antietam that Franklin Blake had come around to give a copy of the Proclamation to each of his slaves. He explained that this was the reason the South was going to war. He said that if such a proclamation was enforced, his “people,” as he called them, would have no work and no place to live. They would have no one to take care of them. He told them to pray for President Davis and General Lee and the Confederacy, so their way of life could be preserved.

  Abraham’s parents told him they said nothing to the master, only accepted the paper and went about their labors. At Hilton Head and Port Royal, Negroes celebrated their freedom with dancing in the streets, but for the Blake slaves, little changed. They were technically free, but as that paper yellowed and curled on their wall, the war raged around them, and they waited in cautious silence to see what would happen.

  Franklin Blake’s only son, fighting for the Confederacy, was killed at far-off Baton Rouge. The master nearly went mad with grief. News trickled into the slave quarters, little by little, stories of battles won and lost, rumors of Negro soldiers fighting for the North, tales of destruction told in horrified whispers.

  When the war reached the Blake plantation, Abraham’s mother was already pregnant with him. She and his father watched the fire rise above the city of Columbia, reddening the horizon, blotting out the stars with smoke and flames. The next day Master Blake, walking like an old and broken man, toured the slave quarters. In a voice that cracked with weary grief, he told everyone they were free to leave whenever they liked.

  Abraham’s parents had no idea where to go or what to do. They owned nothing. They had no skills. All they had was each other and that faded, crackling piece of paper. They unpinned the Emancipation Proclamation from their wall, and set out for the burned city. Abraham Blake, their only child, was born in the ruins of Columbia, in a hut behind a gray clapboard house that had escaped the firestorm.

  By the time he was ten, the sheer weight of poverty had nearly broken his parents. His father walked six miles every day to work for a small cotton farm, whose white yeoman owner had never been able to afford hired help before. He thought having colored workers made him one of the nobility, that aristocracy he had envied and hated before the war. Abraham’s mother, desperate for her son to take advantage of his free status, cleaned floors and windows in the local Baptist church so Abraham could attend the school there. No one had much to eat those years, and the Blakes had less than most. Their health failed, bit by bit. One morning, when Abraham was thirteen, his father failed to wake up. Later that same year, his mother contracted lobar pneumonia. She was gone in a week, leaving Abraham alone in the world.

  He stayed in the hut behind the gray house. He kept going to the Baptist school, because he had promised his mother on her deathbed. He spent his evenings begging odd jobs, or just begging. One or two eating places, now owned by free Negroes, fed him their leftovers. When the school closed, the Freedmen’s Bureau helped Abraham find work on an indigo plantation.

  Not until he arrived at it did Blake realize it was old Fran
klin Blake’s place. The master was still there, stooped and white-haired, resentful now of the Negroes who worked for him. When he learned Abraham’s name, the boy became a special target.

  Franklin Blake often withheld Abraham’s pay on the basis of some complaint. He gave the boy the worst jobs, the dirtiest jobs, and he criticized everything he did. No one intervened when the old man took his cane, Carolina pine with a marble lion’s head on its top, to Abraham’s back. Abraham tried getting help from the Freedmen’s Bureau, but it was a loose organization, and there was no one to counsel him. He grew into a lanky, bone-thin young man, solitary and silent.

  He went on working for Franklin Blake because he didn’t know what else to do. As the old man weakened, his temper grew less and less stable. What was left of his family had dispersed, leaving him alone to descend into despair and madness. He spent his nights drinking. His cook and housekeeper locked themselves in their rooms at night to avoid his rages. One clear, star-filled night, he came looking for someone on whom to vent his ire, and he found eighteen-year-old Abraham and Old Billy, a middle-aged former slave, stirring the work vats. Abraham wore a bandanna around his face against the stench of the indigo.

  Franklin thundered at them, “Whatcha all think you’re doin’? There’s too much lime in that vat!”

  Old Billy knew Franklin Blake’s ways. He dropped his paddle without a word, and fled into the darkness. The paddle spun once in the noisome brew, and started to sink. Abraham tried to catch it with his own, but it slipped away, disappearing below the surface. Franklin strode toward him, shouting, “Now see what y’all done! Now see! Ya Goddamn nigras can’t do anything right without an overseer, and I can’t be ever-place at once!”

  Abraham lodged his paddle in a holder, so it wouldn’t join the other one at the bottom of the vat. He turned slowly to face Franklin, hoping the old man would calm down. “Suh, we wasn’t the ones measured the lime.” He ducked his head, but kept an eye on the lion’s head cane in Franklin’s right hand.