III
Once a year, the week before Christmas, the wards of The Hiram Bingham Charitable School and Institution were treated to a luncheon in one of the Bingham Brothers boardrooms. There was ham, and sweetmeats, and stewed apples, and custards, and at its conclusion, Nathaniel Bingham, their patron and the owner of the bank, would himself come greet them, accompanied by two of his clerks, both of whom were alumni of their very school, and who offered a promise of an adult life that was still too (and would, for most of them, alas, remain) remote and abstract for them to conjure. Mister Bingham would offer a brief speech, encouraging them to be industrious and obedient, and then the children would assemble themselves into two lines and each receive, from one of the clerks, a flat, thick bar of peppermint candy.
All three siblings attended this luncheon, and David’s favorite moment was not the expressions on the children’s faces when they were greeted with the sight of their feast but, rather, the one they assumed when they stepped into the bank’s lobby. He understood their awe, for he never failed to experience it as well: the vast floor of silvery marble, polished to a shining finish; the Ionic columns, hewn from the same stone; the grand rotunda ceiling, inlaid with a gleaming mosaic pattern; the three murals that occupied the length of three whole walls, painted so high that one was all but forced into a supplicative posture to properly see them—the first depicting his great-great-great-grandfather, Ezra, the war hero, distinguishing himself in the battle for independence from Britain; the second, his great-great-grandfather, Edmund, marching northward with some of his fellow Utopians from Virginia to New York to found what would become known as the Free States; the third, his great-grandfather, Hiram, whom he had never known, founding Bingham Brothers and being elected mayor of New York. In the background of all the panels, rendered in browns and grays, were moments from his family’s and country’s history alike: the Siege of Yorktown, where Ezra had fought, his wife and young sons at home in Charlottesville; Edmund marrying his husband, Mark, and the first wars with the Colonies, which the Free States would win, but at great human and financial cost; Hiram and his two brothers, David and John, as young men, unaware that of the three of them, only Hiram, the youngest, would live into his forties, and that only he would produce an heir—his son, Nathaniel, David’s grandfather. At the bottom of each panel was a mounted marble plaque carved with a single word—Civility; Humility; Humanity—which, along with the phrase on the bank’s crest, was the Bingham family’s motto. The fourth panel, the one over the grand front doors, which opened onto Wall Street, was empty, a smooth blank expanse, and it was here that David’s grandfather’s accomplishments would one day be recorded: how he had grown Bingham Brothers into the wealthiest financial institution in not only the Free States but also America; how, until he had helped America fund its fight in the War of Rebellion and secured his country’s autonomy, he had successfully protected the Free States’ existence against every attempt to dismantle it and dissolve the rights of its citizenry; how he paid for the resettlement of free Negroes who had entered the Free States, helping them establish new lives for themselves in the North or the West, as well as escapees from the Colonies. True, Bingham Brothers was no longer the only or, some might argue, the most powerful institution in the Free States, especially with the recent flourishing of the arriviste Jewish banks that had begun to establish themselves in the city, but it was, all would agree, still the most influential, the most prestigious, the most renowned. Unlike the newcomers, David’s grandfather liked to say, Bingham did not confuse ambition for greed, or cleverness for wiliness—its responsibility was as much to the States themselves as to the people it served. “The Great Mister Bingham,” the journals called Nathaniel, occasionally mockingly, as when he attempted to initiate one of his more ambitious projects—such as his proposal, a decade ago, to advance universal suffrage throughout America as well—but mostly sincerely, for David’s grandfather was, indisputably, a great man, someone whose deeds and visage deserved to be painted on plaster, the artist swinging perilously on a rope-and-wood seat high above the stone floor, trying not to look down as he stroked his brush, glossy with paint, over the surface.
But for all this, there was no fifth or sixth panel: No space had been allocated for his father, the family’s second war hero, or for him and his siblings. Although—what would his third of the panel even depict? A man, in his grandfather’s house, waiting for one season to shade into the next, for his life to announce itself to him at last?
Such pity, such indulgence, was unattractive and unbecoming, he knew, and he strode across the foyer to the towering oak doors at the back of the room, where his grandfather’s secretary, a man whom he and his siblings had always known as Norris for as long as he could remember, was already waiting for him.
“Mister David,” he said. “It’s been quite a while.”
“Hello, Norris,” he said. “It has. I trust you’ve been well?”
“Yes, Mister David. And you?”
“Yes, very.”
“The gentleman is here already; I’ll take you to him. Your grandfather will want to see you afterward.”
He followed Norris down the wood-paneled corridor. He was a trim, neat man, with delicate, fine-drawn features, whose hair, when David was young, had been a bright gold and had over the decades faded to the color of parchment. His grandfather was forthright about almost all the matters of his and his family’s life, but about Norris he was evasive; it was accepted by everyone that Norris and his grandfather had an understanding, but despite Nathaniel Bingham’s avowed tolerance for all social classes and his avowed impatience with propriety, he had never introduced Norris as his companion, nor had he ever suggested, to his grandchildren or to anyone, that he might become legally bound to him. Norris came and went from their house at his liberty, but he had no bed there, no room; he never addressed the Bingham children, from the time they were small, without preceding their names with “Master” or “Miss,” and they had long ago ceased suggesting that he might; he was in attendance at certain family events, but he was never included in their after-dinner talks with Grandfather in the parlor, or at Christmas and Easter. Even now, David had no certainty of where Norris lived—he felt he had once heard, somewhere or other, that he resided in a flat near Gramercy Park that Grandfather had purchased for him, years ago—or any specific information about whence he had come, and who his people might have been; he had arrived, before David was born, from the Colonies, and had been working as a coal boy at Bingham Brothers when Grandfather met him. In the Binghams’ company, he was unobtrusive and quiet but also at ease; he was so familiar that he was often forgotten—his presence was assumed, but his absence went unremarked.
Now Norris stopped outside one of the private conference rooms and opened the door, and both the man and the woman inside stood from their chairs and turned as he entered.
“I’ll leave you be,” Norris said, closing the door behind him quietly, as the woman advanced toward him.