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Compared to the Whiting mansion in town, the house Charles Beaumont Whiting
built a decade after his return to Maine was modest. By every other standard
of Empire Falls, where most single-family homes cost well under seventy-five
thousand dollars, his was palatial, with five bedrooms, five full baths, and
a detached artist's studio. C. B. Whiting had spent several formative years
in old Mexico, and the house he built, appearances be damned, was a
mission-style hacienda. He even had the bricks specially textured and
painted tan to resemble adobe. A damn-fool house to build in central Maine,
people said, though they didn't say it to him.
Like all Whiting males, C.B. was a short man who disliked drawing attention
to the fact, so the low-slung Spanish architecture suited him to a T. The
furniture was of the sort used in model homes and trailers to give the
impression of spaciousness; this optical illusion worked well enough except
on those occasions when large people came to visit, and then the effect was
that of a lavish dollhouse.
The hacienda-as C. B. Whiting always referred to it-was built on a tract of
land the family had owned for several generations. The first Whitings of
Dexter County had been in the logging business, and they'd gradually
acquired most of the land on both sides of the Knox River so they could keep
an eye on what floated by on its way to the ocean, some fifty miles to the
southeast. By the time C. B. Whiting was born, Maine had been wired for
electricity, and the river, dammed below Empire Falls at Fairhaven, had lost
much of its primal significance. The forestry industry had moved farther
north and west, and the Whiting family had branched out into textiles and
paper and clothing manufacture.
Though the river was no longer required for power, part of C. B. Whiting's
birthright was a vestigial belief that it was his duty to keep his eye on
it, so when the time came to build his house, he selected a site just above
the falls and across the Iron Bridge from Empire Falls, then a thriving
community of men and women employed in the various mills and factories of
the Whiting empire. Once the land was cleared and his house built, C.B.
would be able to see his shirt factory and his textile mill through the
trees in winter, which, in mid-Maine, was most of the year. His paper mill
was located a couple miles upstream, but its large smokestack billowed
plumes of smoke, sometimes white and sometimes black, that he could see from his back patio.
By moving across the river, C. B. Whiting became the first of his clan to
acknowledge the virtue of establishing a distance from the people who
generated their wealth. The family mansion in Empire Falls, a huge Georgian
affair, built early in the previous century, offered fieldstone fireplaces
in every bedroom and a formal dining room whose oak table could accommodate
upwards of thirty guests beneath half a dozen glittering chandeliers that
had been transported by rail from Boston. It was a house built to inspire
both awe and loyalty among the Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants who came
north from Boston, and among the French Canadians, who came south, all of
them in search of work. The old Whiting mansion was located right in the
center of town, one block from the shirt factory and two from the textile
mill, built there on purpose, if you could believe it, by Whiting men who
worked fourteen-hour days, walked home for their noon meal and then returned
to the factory, often staying far into the night.
As a boy, C.B. had enjoyed living in the Whiting mansion. His mother
complained constantly that it was old, drafty and inconvenient to the
country club, to the lake house, to the highway that led south to Boston,
where she preferred to shop. But with its extensive, shady grounds and its
numerous oddly shaped rooms, it was a fine place to grow up in. His father,
Honus Whiting, loved the place too, especially that only Whitings had ever
lived there. Honus's own father, Elijah Whiting, then in his late eighties,
still lived in the carriage house out back with his ill-tempered wife.
Whiting men had a lot in common, including the fact that they invariably
married women who made their lives a misery. C.B.'s father had fared better
in this respect than most of his forebears, but still resented his wife for
her low opinion of himself, of the Whiting mansion, of Empire Falls, of the
entire backward state of Maine, to which she felt herself cruelly exiled
from Boston. The lovely wrought iron gates and fencing that had been brought
all the way from New York to mark the perimeter of the estate were to her
the walls of her prison, and every time she observed this, Honus reminded
her that he held the key to those gates and would let her out at any time.
If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He
said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of
the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite.
By the time their son was born, though, Honus Whiting was beginning to
understand and privately share his wife's opinion, as least as it pertained
to Empire Falls. As the town mushroomed during the last half of the
nineteenth century, the Whiting estate gradually was surrounded by the homes
of mill workers, and of late the attitude of the people doing the
surrounding seemed increasingly resentful. The Whitings had traditionally
attempted to appease their employees each summer by throwing gala socials on
the family grounds, but it seemed to Honus Whiting that many of the people
who attended these events anymore were singularly ungrateful for the free
food and drink and music, some of them regarding the mansion itself with
hooded expressions that suggested their hearts wouldn't be broken if it
burned to the ground.
Perhaps because of this unspoken but growing animosity, C. B. Whiting had
been sent away, first to prep school, then to college. Afterward he'd spent
the better part of a decade traveling, first with his mother in Europe
(which was much more to that good woman's liking than Maine) and then later
on his own in Mexico (which was much more to his liking than Europe, where
there'd been too much to learn and appreciate). While many European men
towered over him, those in Mexico were shorter, and C. B. Whiting especially
admired that they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their
dreams to fruition. But his father, who was paying for his son's
globe-trotting, finally decided his heir should return home and start
contributing to the family fortune instead of squandering as much as he
could south of the border. Charles Beaumont Whiting was by then in his late
twenties, and his father was coming to the reluctant conclusion that his
only real talent was for spending money, though the young man claimed to be
painting and writing poetry as well. Time to put an end to both, at least in
the old man's view. Honus Whiting was fast approaching his sixtieth
birthday, and though glad he'd been able to indulge his son, he now realized
he'd let it go on too long and that the boy's education in the family
businesses he would one day inherit was long overdue. Honus himself had
begun in the shirt factory, then moved over to the textile mill, and
finally, when old Elijah had lost his mind one day and tried to kill his
wife with a shovel, took over the paper mill upriver. Honus wanted his son
to be prepared for the inevitable day when he, too, would lose his marbles
and assault Charles's mother with whatever weapon came to hand. Europe had
not improved her opinion of himself, of Empire Falls or of Maine, as he had
hoped it might. In his experience people were seldom happier for having
learned what they were missing, and all Europe had done for his wife was
encourage her natural inclination toward bitter and invidious comparison.
For his part, Charles Beaumont Whiting, sent away from home as a boy when he
would've preferred to stay, now had no more desire to return from Mexico
than his mother had to return from Europe, but when summoned he sighed and
did as he was told, much as he always had done. It wasn't as if he hadn't
known that the end of his youth would arrive, taking with it his travels,
his painting and his poetry. There was never any question that Whiting and
Sons Enterprises would one day devolve to him, and while it occurred to him
that returning to Empire Falls and taking over the family businesses might
be a violation of his personal destiny as an artist, there didn't seem to be
any help for it. One day, when he sensed the summons growing near, he tried
to put down in words what he felt to be his own best nature and how wrong it
would be to thwart his true calling. His idea was to share these thoughts
with his father, but what he'd written sounded a lot like his poetry, vague
and unconvincing even to him, and he ended up throwing the letter away. For
one thing he wasn't sure his father, a practical man, would concede that
anybody had a nature to begin with; and if you did, it was probably your
duty either to deny it or to whip it into shape, show it who was boss.
During his last months of freedom in Mexico, C.B. lay on the beach and
argued the point with his father in his imagination, argued it over and
over, losing every time, so when the summons finally came he was too worn
out to resist. He returned home determined to do his best but fearing that
he'd left his real self and all that he was capable of in Mexico.
What he discovered was that violating his own best nature wasn't nearly as
unpleasant or difficult as he'd imagined. In fact, looking around Empire
Falls, he got the distinct impression that people did it every day. And if
you had to violate your destiny, doing so as a Whiting male wasn't so bad.
To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what
you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at
something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
While the shirt factory held no attraction for him, he demonstrated
something like an aptitude for running it, for understanding the underlying
causes of what went wrong and knowing instinctively how to fix the problem.
He was also fond of his father and marveled at the little man's energy, his
quick anger, his refusal to knuckle under, his conviction that he was always
right, his ability to justify whatever course of action he ultimately chose.
Here was a man who was either in total harmony with his nature or had beaten
it into perfect submission. Charles Beaumont Whiting was never sure which,
and probably it didn't matter; either way the old man was worth emulating.
Still, it was clear to C. B. Whiting that his father and grandfather had
enjoyed the best of what Whiting and Sons Enterprises had to offer. The
times were changing, and neither the shirt factory, nor the textile mill,
nor the paper mill upriver was as profitable as all once had been. Over the
last two decades there had been attempts to unionize all the factories in
Dexter County, and while these efforts failed-this being Maine, not
Massachusetts-even Honus Whiting agreed that keeping the unions out had
proved almost as costly as letting them in would've been. The workers, slow
to accept defeat, were both sullen and unproductive when they returned to
their jobs.
Honus Whiting had intended, of course, for his son to take up residence in
the Whiting mansion as soon as he took a wife and old Elijah saw fit to quit
the earth, but a decade after C.B. abandoned Mexico, neither of these events
had come to pass. C. B. Whiting, something of a ladies' man in his warm,
sunny youth, seemed to lose his sex drive in frosty Maine and slipped into
an unintended celibacy, though he sometimes imagined his best self still
carnally frolicking in the Yucatán.
Perhaps he was frightened by the sheer prospect of matrimony, of marrying a
girl he would one day want to murder.
Elijah Whiting, now nearing one hundred, had not succeeded in killing his
wife with the shovel, nor had he recovered from the disappointment. The two
of them still lived in the carriage house, old Elijah clinging to his misery
and his bitter wife clinging to him. He seemed, the old man's doctor
observed, to be dying from within, the surest sign of which was an almost
biblical flatulence. He'd been turning the air green inside the carriage
house for many years now, but all the tests showed that the old fossil's
heart remained strong, and Honus realized it might be several years more
before he could make room for his son by moving into the carriage house
himself. After all, it would require a good year to air out even if the old
man died tomorrow. Besides which, Honus's own wife had already made clear
her intention never to move into the carriage house, and she lately had
become so depressed by the idea of dying in Maine that he'd been forced to
buy her a small rowhouse in Boston's Back Bay, where she claimed to have
grown up, which of course was untrue. South Boston was where Honus had found her, and where he would have left her, too, if he'd had any sense. At any
rate, when Charles came to him one day and announced his intention to build
a house of his own and to put the river between it and Empire Falls, he
understood and even approved. Only later, when the house was revealed to be
a hacienda, did he fear that the boy might be writing poems again.
Not to worry. Earlier that year, C. B. Whiting had been mistaken for his
father on the street, and that same evening, when he studied himself in the
mirror, he saw why. His hair was beginning to silver, and there was a
certain terrier-like ferocity in his eyes that he hadn't noticed before. Of
the younger man who had wanted to live and die in Mexico and dream and paint
and write poetry there was now little evidence. And last spring when his
father had suggested that he run not only the shirt factory but also the
textile mill, instead of feeling trapped by the inevitability of the rest of
his life, he found himself almost happy to be coming more completely into
his birthright. Men had starting calling him C.B. instead of Charles, and he
liked the sound of it.
