The soirée had been Feeney’s idea. There’d been a recent trade exposition in San Francisco, and the captains of industry in attendance were quite glad to be diverted to the backwater outpost of Vancouver for a spree of on-the-house revelry. The newly constructed Hotel Vancouver’s financers had gone belly up during the Crash, leaving the building unfinished, so Harris paid a hefty special consideration fee to host it here. But such a party would have been unthinkable without Feeney: Harris couldn’t possibly face its social demands without his trusted describer at his side.
Feeney leads him to the bar, where they sit on high stools and listen to gravel-throated men guffaw in unison. Feeney hands him a fresh sake, of which Harris has ordered a case from Osaka and has already burned through half. He knows he shouldn’t have more, as he’s already beginning to experience something of a “little hell,” but he brings it to his lips anyway.
“Go ahead, describe my party to me,” Harris says, spinning around before leaning back against the bar, his tongue limber with drink.
“Diamond-drenched women in close-cut silk saunter past,” Feeney says, hamming it up. “Clasped to the arms of ugly old industrialists richer than Olympus. Already your guests seem to have aligned themselves according to what feature of Mother Earth they’ve committed themselves to destroying. Gold men in the corner. Oil near the exits. Railway executives and coal magnates colluding near the bar. I see Sir James Dunn of Algoma Steel. William H. Wright of Lakeshore Gold is positively maroon-faced. The king of the grain elevators, C.D. Howe, is sucking down a canapé as though it caused him harm. And the lecherous R.J. Holt of Holt Industries looks like he could fuck an ottoman.”
“Any sign of Rockefeller?”
“Not yet. The word is he was an accomplished rower in his day, and is still quite handsome. If rich industrialists are your fancy,” Feeney remarks, digging a covert elbow between Harris’s ribs.
“How about conversation?” Harris asks. “I can’t make anything out in all this racket. What’s in the air?”
“Well,” Feeney exhales. “Mostly the talk is of Roosevelt. The creeping rot of socialism. Japan’s sabre-rattling. The worries in Europe. Balloons moored to buildings. Chesty movie starlets. Oh, and I heard a rousing speech endorsing those draconian work camps that Prime Minister Bennett has enacted as an antidote to the Crash.”
“I should be giving the speeches,” Harris grumbles. “I’m the one paying for all this hot air.”
Since the Crash, the skittish Canadian banks have been reluctant to lend venture capital, especially not to financially imperilled lumbermen, so Harris was forced to secure purchase financing for John Rockefeller’s Port Alberni parcel from a London firm. Now all he needs to do is convince the American to sell—a gambit that he and Feeney have planned for later.
When the dinner bell is rung the pair take their seats to the chime of crystal glasses and the slurp of consommé. Harris has tucked himself and Feeney away from the powerful tables, mostly because Harris disdains dinner conversation at formal affairs, the smear of unrecognizable voices coming pell-mell as he is invariably trapped beside some self-interested boor.
“I’m off to hunt the elusive Rockefeller,” Feeney says after their salads. And before Harris can protest, he’s gone.
“Clams for monsieur,” a waiter says from somewhere to his left, and Harris proceeds to chase the little flaccid lumps around the buttery skating rink of his plate, while everywhere glasses clash and laughter brays, a kind of auditory miasma that only amplifies his unease. He hadn’t planned to spend even a portion of the evening alone, and in Feeney’s absence, his tie feels as though it’s been tightened. Harris keeps his eyes low to avoid projecting the impression to those at his table that he’d care to converse.
Then the deep voice of a man materializes through the din. “Sorry to disturb you during your meal, Mr. Greenwood,” a stranger says from where Feeney had just been sitting. The man goes on to suggest that Everett is somehow miraculously alive. But Harris has dealt with such fraudsters before. Once, a woman claiming to be his daughter turned up at his mansion and demanded that Harris buy her a new washing machine.
“And let me guess, all you need is a tidy sum of money and you’ll deliver him to me, is that correct?” Harris booms out. “I can assure you that I’m not some gullible War widow easily duped by promises of resurrection.” Now he begins to yell: “So beat it before I have my assistants throw you out, face-first!”
“My apologies, Mr. Greenwood,” the deep-voiced man says with perplexing calm in the face of such a threat. “Perhaps another time.”
When he’s sure the man is gone, Harris is left huffing, and reaches for his sake to allay his rage—only to discover it replaced by a flute of champagne, which he doesn’t care for but gulps anyway. If only that deplorable grifter were right! If only Everett had joined him after the War, as he’d promised, and hadn’t gone off wandering. What they could’ve accomplished! If his brother were here now, together they’d turn out the lot of these vampires and leeches, because that’s what they are, here to suck the blood of all he’s built.
As the waiters have been silently refilling his champagne, Harris has lost count of his drinks. His face is clammy, his armpits damp, and there is a numbness to his cheeks that provokes him to rub them with his palms. He hears scattered laughter, and without Feeney, there’s no way of knowing if it’s at his own expense. And where is Liam? How long has it been? No doubt he’s chatting up John D. Rockefeller—what a noble sacrifice!
When the band breaks, the voice of a woman is revealed some seats to his right, prattling on about a newly proposed Dominion Forest Service. Harris encountered the term ecology at Yale and liked the idea—the conservation of exceptional forests for the purposes of science and recreation. Still, he wonders how it could be implemented without strangling industry. The current fashion is to create reserves, preserves, national parks, like Roosevelt has done in the U.S. It’s as if the man won’t rest until the world is one big sandbox for mankind to play in. No, better to cut them now, Harris thinks. Get some use out of them. Start the regrow sooner than later.
“Yes, yes, trees are lovely,” Harris hears himself mutter.
“Pardon me, sir?” a woman says. “I didn’t catch that. Can you speak up?”
“You think trees are sacred,” he says. “That they love you. That they grow for your enjoyment. But those who really know trees know they’re also ruthless. They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed. And they’d gladly crush or poison every single one of us if it gave them any advantage.”
“I daresay that’s a rather bleak view of the world,” a woman says, whether it’s the same woman as before he’s not sure.
“Madam, I have no view of the world,” Harris pronounces, reusing Feeney’s line of indignity while hoisting a fresh glass of champagne, the taste for which he’s now fully acquired—like the crabapples he and Everett once hurled at each other on their woodlot. “And what can be more bleak than nothing?” he says.
The woman wonders aloud who invited him as a hand brushes his lapel.