New York - The Novel

that I have learned that it is useless to question why they fell out as they did. It is destiny. That’s all. I don’t think,” he added, “that we shall see him again.”
    “No,” she said, “I don’t suppose we shall.”

    On November 25, 1783, at the head of eight hundred Continental troops, General George Washington came peacefully down the old Indian trail from the village of Harlem, and entered the city of New York. Riding slowly down the Bowery and Queen Street, to the cheers of the crowd, he turned into Wall Street and crossed to Broadway, where he was greeted with a fulsome public address.
    The Master household went to Wall Street to watch. James rode in Washington’s company, only twenty feet behind him. Abigail noticed that her father seemed quite pleased with the whole affair.
    “Washington has a most stately air,” he remarked with approval.
    But it was a tiny incident later that afternoon that gave him even more pleasure. The general was to be given a banquet at Fraunces Tavern, only a stone’s throw from the Master house, where James came to dress beforehand. As James was departing, a clatter of hoofs in the street announced the arrival of Washington and a party of officers, on their way to the gathering. James greeted them in the street, while Abigail and her father stood at the open door, watching.
    And it was then that, glancing across at them, the tall, grave-faced general bowed to Abigail courteously and, as he had once before, but with a nod of recognition this time, and even the ghost of a smile, gravely touched his hat to her father, who bowed low in turn.
    At dinner with Abby and young Weston, a little while later, having told Hudson to break out a bottle of his best red wine, Master raised his glass in a toast.
    “Well, Abby,” he said with considerable cheerfulness, “and you too, Weston, my dear grandson, the world that I knew is turned upside down. So let’s drink to the new one.”

The Capital
1790
    J OHN MASTER GAZED at them all. The hot summer day made the air in the house close. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. It was a pity that Abigail wasn’t here—she could always keep him in order. But with her first child due any day now, she was staying at her house up in Dutchess County. So he stared at them all—at his son James, graduate of Oxford, his grandson Weston, about to go to Harvard, and at their distinguished visitor, whose outrageous statement James and Weston seemed content to accept without a protest.
    “As far as I’m concerned,” he said to Thomas Jefferson, “you can go to Hell.”
    Not that Thomas Jefferson believed in Hell, Master supposed, or Heaven for that matter.
    Until now, John Master had found himself surprisingly content to be a citizen of the United States of America. For Washington himself he had a deep respect. At Washington’s inauguration in the nation’s capital of New York, he had stood in the crowd on Wall Street as the great man took the oath on the balcony of the Federal Hall, and he had taken pride in the fact that, when he walked down the street with James, the great men of the new state—Adams, Hamilton, Madison—would greet his son as a respected friend.
    As for the new Constitution that the wise men of the nation had framed in Philadelphia, Master had been very impressed. It seemed to him that, with its admirable system of checks and balances, the documentcould hardly be bettered. When Madison and the Federalists had argued, against the Antifederalists, that the states must yield some of their independence, so that the republic could have a strong central government, he’d thought the Federalists were quite right.
    “We should accept the Constitution as it is,” he had argued. But here, his natural conservatism had come into conflict with his son.
    “I follow Jefferson,” James had declared. Jefferson was acting as the new state’s representative in Paris at that time and, while approving of the Constitution, he had raised one objection.
    “The Constitution still fails to protect the freedom of the individual. Unless an amendment is made, our republic will finish up just as tyrannical as the old monarchies like England.” This was a gross exaggeration, his father had responded, but James had been insistent. Freedom of religion was not sufficiently guaranteed, he insisted, nor was freedom of the press. On the latter subject, he’d even started to give his father a lecture about the Zenger trial until Master had