Woodsburner by John Pipkin Page B

Eliot's former assistant to full partner in the new company; James Thomas Fields, a mere junior clerk at Carter, Hendee & Co., had shown the sheepish foresight to stay on after Eliot departed. And, if all
that
were not intolerable enough, Mr. Ticknor and Mr. Fields, like a pair of insufferable schoolboys on holiday, began to fancy themselves poets. Poets! The audacious booksellers even held readings of their own work in their shop. It is all too much for Eliot to bear, to think that these men stood between him and financial liberty.
    There was a time, Eliot reminds himself, when money was something that he had neither sought nor possessed in anysignificant quantity. In his youth, wealth held no communion with his literary ambitions. Yet now he often lies awake at night, wondering if the next day's business will be slow enough to allow him a few moments alone to work on the next scene of
The House of Many Windows
. During busy hours he hopes for such moments, though he knows that he will not actually use the time to write; he will sit hunched over his unfinished play worrying about the day's receipts and hoping that an increase in business the next day will compensate for the deficiency. That is the paradox of the modern age: a man needs to make a healthy sum of money in order to pretend that money does not matter to him. Some nights it surprises Eliot that his wife, sound asleep in the bedroom next to his, cannot hear the loud worries buzzing through his head. He knows it is foolish to suppose that anyone might remain unaltered by the passage of years, but he wonders if Margaret can detect the slow changes that he daily identifies with staggering disappointment.
    The first time he saw her was in the old Federal Street Theater, a year before it was sold as a meeting hall to the Baptist Church. Margaret Mahoney was a dark-haired beauty then, slender and fairskinned, a warm and breathing portrait of the kind of woman Eliot thought only inhabited sonnets. He had followed her through the lobby, thinking she was an actress until he saw her take a seat in the box to the right of the stage, next to an older man with a pointed nose similar to her own. Although the stage was only partially visible from where Eliot sat, his view of the beautiful woman was unobstructed, and the flickering lamps on the stage cast enough light to illuminate her face, which shone with the spectral beauty that drove men to do ridiculous things. She did not cast her eyes about the audience like so many of the other women, looking for familiar faces in less expensive seats or checking to make sure that her dress was of the latest fashion. Her eyes, remarkably enough, remained fixed on the stage throughoutthe entire performance, as if she were truly engaged in the unfolding drama.
    Eliot watched the forgettable play from his usual twenty-five-cent place in the gallery. He saw no need to spend more. He had learned from the example of his father's strict household economy, and he budgeted his own meager income carefully. His father was a tutor of classical languages, and though Ambrose Calvert enjoyed no small degree of respect in the community, that respect stopped short of providing him with the financial means to participate in the city's more refined pursuits. It had angered Eliot to think that his father, who spent his days deciphering the subtleties of classical drama to the dull sons of moneyed Bostonians, could ill afford to attend the theater packed with the tea merchants and bankers and other men of business whose broad backsides barely fit into the seats.
    Eliot remembers the relief that he was certain he saw flit across his father's brow when he explained that he had taken employment as a typesetter's assistant at Carter, Hendee & Co., where he intended to earn a living until his talents as a dramatist delivered him to fame's doorstep. Eliot wanted a job that left his imagination untapped for his own use. Setting type and inking plates required a good