New York - The Novel

life.”
    “That just shows you haven’t read it, dear,” she said. “Uncle Tom’s as real as you or me, and not at all sentimental. When it’s necessary, he encourages slaves to run away. As for the rest, slaves are separated from their children, flogged and sold down the river. Are you saying these things don’t happen?”
    “I guess I’m not,” said Frank.
    “Everyone agrees it’s a wonderful book.”
    “Not in the South, they don’t. I heard that a man in Arkansas was run out of town for selling it. The South says the book’s a criminal slander. They’re furious.”
    “Well, they should be repentant.”
    “It’s not surprising really,” he continued mildly. “After all, the villain of the book is a typical Southern slave holder.”
    “Actually,” said Hetty, “if you’d read the book you’d know he’s a Yankee who moved south. The Southern gentleman in the book is a kindly man.”
    “Well, people in the South don’t like it, anyhow.”
    “The point is not about any individual, Frank. It’s about a system.”
    They had walked as far as Thirty-sixth Street. Seeing a cab, Master hailed it, hoping the business of getting in would break his wife’s concentration. It didn’t.
    “The system, Frank,” she continued, as soon as they were seated, “whereby one human being can own another as a chattel. This book”—she took it out, and clearly meant to give it to him—“is a Christian book, Frank. A challenge to all Christians. How can we countenance such an evil in our land?”
    “And what,” he asked wearily, “do you expect me to do about it?”
    She paused. Evidently she had been thinking about it.
    “I think, Frank,” she said quietly, “that we ought to consider whether we do business with slave owners.”
    He almost cried, “Are you out of your mind?” But fortunately, he caught himself, and waited a few moments before he replied.
    “Hard to be a New York merchant and have nothing to do with the cotton trade.”
    That was quite an understatement. Generations of New York men had assiduously courted the cotton planters—at first, buying the Southerners’ raw cotton and shipping it to England (when, had they been a bit sharper, the Southern planters could have shipped direct and saved themselves New York’s commissions), and thereafter making their grand, all-purpose trade so indispensable, and their finances so entangled with the South, that it was hard to imagine the one without the other. Frank Master shipped cotton; and he sold goods, and debt, to the South. It was a good percentage of his business.
    She put her arm on his. “I know, Frank. I understand that it wouldn’t be easy. But you are also a good Christian. I didn’t marry you just for your money,” she added with a smile.
    And I didn’t marry you, he thought to himself, to have you interfere with my making it. As the cab took them home, he said nothing more, but he sensed that his wife was determined about this business. In more than ten years of marriage, he and Hetty had never had a serious quarrel, and he wasn’t sure what it would be like if they did.

    At about the time when Frank and Hetty Master had ascended the Observatory, Mary O’Donnell had prepared to leave her friends. They had spent such a pleasant afternoon, the four of them: Mary and Gretchen, and Gretchen’s little brother Theodore and cousin Hans.
    Mary was fond of little Theodore. He was five years younger than Gretchen, and his blue eyes were darker than hers, and set very wide apart. If his sister was blonde, he’d inherited his father’s curly brown hair. And from an early age, he’d possessed a remarkable sense of his own identity. When he was five, a lady in the shop, meaning only kindness, had asked him: “Do people call you Teddy?” Theodore had shaken his head. “Why not, dear?” she’d asked. “Because,” he had answered solemnly, “I do not wish it.” By the age of ten, he’d also announced that he wouldn’t be following his father in the chocolate business. “What will you do, Theodore?” the family had asked him. “Something with no chocolate in it,” he’d said. This had displeased his mother considerably, but his father had been more understanding. “Leave him be,” he had said. “Anyway, this isn’t such a good business.” Gretchen and Mary usually took Theodore with them, even though he was so much younger.
    But Hans was another matter. He’d been a distant figure when Marywas young, though