After that episode in the garret, Mrs. Steele’s patience with the boy gave out. She insisted on sending him to a strict military school. He’d come home in the summertime when she was in Nantucket, and prowl about the city during the long evenings. In Twelfth Street, seemingly deserted, he’d run up and down stoops, pulling bells; then the “spring rollers” would fly up, and he’d count the genteel poor who were sweltering in New York; when he grew too old for such pranks, he would spend his evenings in the garret watching his father and grandfather playing a strange game of cards called “Tarac” and listening to their jargon. He learnt the game and the jargon, with great rapidity.
His father, who was always afraid of troubling his wife, died suddenly at his desk; then the old man’s mind bolted.
Mrs. Steele in a burst of confidence said one day to Mr. Garrison:
“It may be very wicked of me, but I pray to God not to let him live long.” Her prayer was answered; unrighteous prayers usually are. After that, Mrs. Steele closed the house and went to live in Boston; later she sent Martin to Harvard. Floyd wrote him several times, but his letters were not answered; it was many years before the two boys met again.
6
Floyd didn’t go to college—his father couldn’t spare him, but he gave him a good classical education, under the best professors. Mr. Garrison wasn’t training his son for business; he wanted him to be a man of culture. They took long walks into the country, with Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow for companions. Thoreau was revolutionary, a disjointed mind. The historical novels then in vogue were read and reread, also foreign literature. Realism, Nihilism, and all the other isms were looked into and studied as the result of “unhealthy” European conditions. Mr. Garrison moulded his son in good clay.
Sunday was the happiest day in the week for Floyd. He would slip out of the little Dutch Reform church around the corner, restless when the pastor strung out his sermon fearing he should miss Julie, who went to the Cathedral. Lately, he was fortunate to find her there without her mother.
Good Friday,—the Cathedral draped in black. The sorrow-laden music, the odor of incense gave him a sensuous feeling of emotion. Julie came down the aisle, her prayer book pressed against her heart, her eyes seeking things beyond this world. It seemed to the impressionable youth a desecration to “bring her back.”
He looked at the sad faces and bowed heads.
“It’s wonderful after so many centuries, this sense of personal loss in the people; life would be unbearable without the Easter joy, the lilies, the Resurrection.”