Skinny Island Read Free

cried in instant indignation. "Judge Morrissey is putting together a real estate deal that could make our fortune if he'd only include Charles. Oh, Father, you can't spoil it!"
    "I know all about Morrissey's real estate deals," I said dryly. "I also know about his congressional record during the war. The man is not only dishonest; he was a Copperhead. He backed McClellan in sixty-four. I could almost prove he was a traitor. And you told him that
I
would favor his admission to the Irving? I wonder he didn't laugh in your face."
    "On the contrary, he said he had always been one of your greatest admirers."
    "Well, he can continue to admire me from afar. A member of the Irving! Why, even if I could face the scandalized faces of my fellow members, how could I bear the reproachful eyes of your brother Archie's spirit? Or of the three hundred thousand other boys who perished to preserve our union."
    "Oh, Father, you and your war. It's always hopeless when you start waving the bloody shirt."
    My
war! The bloody shirt! In one small decade had all memory of valor departed from the land? I had to be quiet for a moment to keep myself from some unseemly explosion. It was true that my enthusiasm for the Union cause had amounted to a religion—almost, in the eyes of some, to fanaticism. I had perhaps thought too much in terms of the glorious phrases of Mrs. Howe's battle hymn accompanying General Sherman's thrilling march to the sea and too little in terms of the corpses and maimed bodies of our boys in blue. And on occasion I force myself to recall—oh, the bitter memory!—the mild reproach of my darling Archie the first time he was wounded and I rushed to his side in Virginia with a pass from Secretary of War Stanton himself. "Father," he murmured from his bed of pain, "did you stop to think that the men who escorted you to the front may have had to risk their lives?" Which is why I did not go to him after his fatal wounding at Gettysburg and was not there to hold his hand when he died. But whatever my exaggerations, whatever my sentimentalities even, as some might call them, are they not preferable to Agatha's cold indifference to the generation of dead boys that made her ease and opulence possible?
    "Some memories will always be sacred to me," I at last limited myself to stating.
    "But don't you see, you can't just live in memories?" Agatha demanded. "The world moves on. Archie himself would have seen that. He was always a practical fellow. He and I used to conspire together on how to dress things up when we had something to ask of you that we were afraid you'd refuse."
    "Are you implying, Agatha, that Archie, if alive today, would approve of my taking into a club a man who wanted to sell out to secession?"
    "All I'm saying is that Archie would have let bygones be bygones. He did enough fighting in the war. He wouldn't have kept it up all his life."
    I am afraid that I almost disliked my daughter at that particular moment. Certainly I did not wish to stay another minute under her roof.

    That unhappy night we sat down twelve at my board for a dinner meeting of the Irving Club. The dozen men present included two judges, a former governor, a former mayor, the president of Columbia University, Jacob Smull and my son Philip. I thought the dining room with its Duncan Phyfe chairs, its splendid dark mahogany sideboard with the golden eagle claw feet and my great Sully of President Washington had never looked finer. I hoped that it would make a suitable impression on Smull for his first appearance in our midst. It did not.
    But nothing would have, as I now sadly see, other than the promise of a profitable investment. Smull appeared to me that night in the full glare of his singleness of mind and purpose. Perhaps it was the contrast that he afforded to my more richly variegated guests. Small, dry, bald, tight-lipped, he seemed to have shriveled to a mere husk of acquisitiveness. He did not even bother to pretend that it was a