Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath Page A

into believing he was preparing Julius for life, when in truth he was indulging his own feelings of frustration and perhaps, too, his widower’s grief, which was, as I say, intense—it affected him deeply, and he sank into a state of such despondency that for some days the atmosphere in the house began to affect even Julius’ spirits. But at all events, the beatings came to a halt.
    The sisters had good cause to feel pleased with themselves. Charlotte was especially gratified that their intervention had proved effective, although in her father’s presence she showed nothing of this and for the first and only time in her life behaved as the demure andmodest creature she was expected to be, passing through the household and going about her tasks with lowered eyes, and speaking in a voice so quiet as barely to be audible. Her father could not know it, but Charlotte had plans for Julius.
    So Noah was forced to abandon his long-held hope that his son would inherit the House of van Horn, and began to look for some young man he could groom as his successor. It was not difficult. New York in those days, as indeed today, did not lack for clever men eager to seize an opportunity to work every hour of the day and night so as to establish their name and their fortune.
    It was in many ways an odd choice he made. Where he found Max Rinder I do not know for sure, but although his family came from Bavaria they were not part of that great tide of Europeans which came pouring into New York hot on the heels of the Irish and settled north of the Five Points all the way to Fourteenth Street, so creating a city within the city that had more Germans in it than any other place save Berlin and Vienna!
    But that was not Max Rinder. His family hadbeen on Long Island for two generations, where by all accounts they were contented and industrious, the elder Rinder being something in a brewery. Max, however, had ambition. It may be that he was already a clerk in the van Horn warehouse on Old Slip when he first came to Noah’s attention, probably through a display of the kind of qualities Noah would approve—initiative, enterprise, punctuality, deference, or maybe not deference, maybe rather an independence of thought and a readiness to speak up boldly even at the risk of arousing the awful displeasure of the master. He was a sallow young man, above medium height although somewhat stooped, for he had a bony deformity at the top of his spine which is apparent in all the photographs. He had a large sloping brow with a Napoleonic lick of jet-black hair at peak and temple and pale, deep-set eyes—hypnotic eyes, like a snake-charmer or a preacher, which he would fasten unblinking upon whomever he was talking to, the effect unsettling. He was quick in all his movements and even quicker in his thinking, a characteristic particularly esteemed by Noah van Horn, who yielded to no man in his estimate of his own brains when it came to matters of business.
    An odd choice, as I say, and it must have saddened Noah to take on this clever young man from Long Island in place of his own son. As for Julius, whom his father had already put to work in his counting-house, no sadness there, none at all—he was delighted at his imminent release from what had become an irksome captivity at a narrow, inky desk and a most tedious set of duties involving the keeping of accounts of bills of lading and cargo manifests and the like. Julius had difficulty with any task involving numbers, indeed with any application of reason to an abstract problem, and this was not his only deficiency, far from it. By all accounts he was a cheerful, friendly boy but he was profoundly disorganized. He was late for his appointments, often lost his money, his house-key, on one occasion his
shoes
, even, and his memory for names was that of an old person suffering from dementia. As to his appearance he was a long-limbed, lanky youth with a chaotic tumble of yellow curls. He grinned wildly when he was