Chapter 8 - The Commission’s Chair
The hearing room of the State Maritime Advisory Commission looked like a cross between an episcopal vestry and a nineteenth-century bank vault.
The walls were paneled in three-inch slabs of black walnut, dark with eighty years of linseed oil and cigar smoke, framed by tall, arched windows that looked out over the muddy bends of the northern river. Above the bench hung the oil portraits of seven former chairmen, every one of them bearing the distinctive, aquiline nose of the Holloway family or their second cousins from the timber trusts.
The clock on the wall was cast bronze, shaped like a ship’s wheel, its long second hand ticking forward with a dry, mechanical clack that sounded like a rifle bolt clearing an empty chamber.
It was eight-fifty-five on Thursday morning.
The benches behind the rail were packed with men who smelled of wool, damp macintoshes, and cheap tobacco—the delegates from the three dockworkers' locals, the teamsters from the terminal spurs, and the independent dredge operators who had spent ten years fighting the Holloway rail monopoly for access to the public slips.
They didn't sit in the front rows. They left the front row empty.
In the center of that empty bench sat Caroline Holloway.
She was alone.
Her father was not there; Richard was at that moment sitting in a private consultation room at the state hospital in Trenton, where his lawyers were attempting to convince three court-appointed cardiologists that his irregular heartbeat made him incompetent to enter a plea on sixteen counts of municipal fraud.
Her mother was not there; she had been moved that morning to the carriage house of a distant cousin in Delaware who had agreed to take her in only after Marcus Boyd agreed to postpone the sheriff's sale on her remaining silver spoons.
Caroline was wearing a black wool dress—not an expensive one, but an old, off-the-rack garment that had belonged to her aunt, the hem uneven, the waist pinned at the back with two large steel safety pins to keep it from sagging over her ribs. She had no hat. Her hair was tied back with a piece of black twine she had found in the glove compartment of the rusted station wagon.
She didn't look at the men behind her. She stared straight ahead at the high walnut bench where three empty leather armchairs sat beneath the state seal.
At precisely eight-fifty-eight, the side door opened.
Two of the commissioners entered: Miller, the retired sand-and-gravel operator from the southern county, and Henderson, the former president of the canal pilots' association. They didn't take the center chair; they took the seats on the left and right, their faces grim, their leather-bound briefing books closed on the baize cloth before them.
The center chair—the high-backed chair with the carved pelican on the headrest, the chair that Richard Holloway had occupied since the year I turned twelve—remained empty for sixty seconds.
Then the door opened again.
I didn't carry a briefcase.
I walked through the rail gate, my boots making no sound on the heavy wool runner that had been laid down for the governors of the previous century. I wore the same dark three-piece suit, my hands clean, my collar ironed by my mother on the yellow pine table on Tenth Street three hours ago.
I didn't sit at the petitioner's table where the applicants for harbor rights were expected to wait with their blue-printed maps and their letters of credit.
I climbed the three steps to the bench.
I took the center chair.
A collective intake of breath swept through the rear benches—not a gasp of surprise, but that deep, low murmur that runs through a crowd at an auction when the high bidder is finally revealed to be the man who owns the mortgage on the courthouse.
Caroline’s head jerked upward.
Her eyes hit mine with the force of an uncoupled freight car. Her mouth fell open, her hands clawing at the black wool of her lap, the safety pins at her back creaking under the sudden tension of her spine.
"No," she whispered. The word didn't carry to the stenographer's desk, but I saw the shape of her lips. "No."
Commissioner Miller cleared his throat, his hand adjusting the microphone on the gooseneck stand.
"The extraordinary session of the State Maritime Advisory Commission is now convened," Miller said, his voice flat, gravelly, reading from a typed sheet that had been delivered to his chambers forty minutes ago by Marcus Boyd. "Under Section 12 of the Emergency Transport Reorganization Act of 1933, the Governor has accepted the resignation of Richard Holloway as Chairman and designated representative of the public trust."
Miller paused, looking up through his bifocals toward the empty rows.
"Pursuant to the provisions of the State Harbor Recovery Fund, the holder of sixty percent or more of the outstanding municipal port bonds is entitled to nominate the interim presiding officer until the next general session of the assembly."
He turned his head toward me.
"The bonds having been verified by the State Treasurer at seven-thirty this morning, the chair recognizes Daniel Vance of Tenth Street as presiding officer."
The gavel sat on the green felt to my right.
It was made of lignum vitae, dark and heavy as an iron wedge, its handle worn smooth by three generations of Holloways who had used it to gavel down every petition from the dockworkers' unions since the year of the great rail strike.
I picked it up.
The wood was cold. It felt exactly like the handle of the four-pound sledge I had used to break slag out of the old basin furnaces when I was fourteen.
"Item One," I said.
My voice filled the room without the aid of the microphone. It carried into the corners of the black walnut paneling, out through the high arched windows, down to the street where the newspaper vans were already idling at the curb.
"The application of the Holloway Rail & Timber Syndicate for an exclusive thirty-year franchise on the deep-water approaches to Blackwood Basin."
I didn't look at the documents on the table.
"The application is defective," I said. "The applicant lacks the necessary capital reserves under Section 4 of the maritime code. The underlying leases having been extinguished by foreclosure in the county court on Tuesday morning, the application is denied with prejudice."
I brought the gavel down.
The sound was not a polite tap; it was a single, explosive crack that split the silence of the room like a dry pine plank snapping under a steam roller.
Caroline flinched. Her shoulders jumped as if she had been struck between the shoulder blades with a dock spar.
"Item Two," I said, leaning forward with both forearms on the high bench. "The application of the Tenth Street Logistics Corporation for the designation of Blackwood Basin as a free municipal terminal, with equal wharfage rights for all licensed carriers and sixty percent of all gross tonnage fees dedicated to the public school construction fund of the fourth ward."
Miller raised his hand. "Second."
"Henderson?" I looked to my left.
"Aye," the old canal pilot said, his hand already signing the parchment confirmation.
"The motion carries," I said.
The gavel fell a second time.
Crack.
The men in the back row stood up.
They didn't cheer; they were men who had been disappointed by politicians too many times to waste their breath on shouting. But they began to file out through the double doors, their heavy boots making the floorboards groan, their caps pulled down over their ears as they headed down to the docks to tell the morning shifts that the gates at Blackwood were open and the Holloway tolls were dead.
Caroline didn't move.
She remained on the bench while the commissioners gathered their papers and left through the side door, until the stenographer had packed her ribbons and closed her machine, until the only people left in the room were Caroline, myself, and the portrait of her great-grandfather hanging on the walnut wall above the clock.
I stood up from the high-backed chair.
I didn't take the gavel. I left it lying on the green felt, an inch from the inkwell where the names had been signed.
I walked down the three steps to the floor, stopping two feet from the bench where she sat.
Her head was down now. She was looking at her shoes—a pair of cracked black leather oxfords that had been resoled with cheap composition rubber that smelled of petroleum.
"You have twenty minutes to clear the carriage house, Caroline," I said.
She didn't look up. "There’s nothing left in the carriage house."
"There’s your trunk," I said. "The one with your school ribbons and the silver cups you won at the horse shows. The bailiffs left it on the gravel by the gate. If you don't pick it up by noon, the city trash truck will take it down to the incinerator at the Point."
Her hands twitched on her lap.
"Why didn't you just let us have the terminal, Daniel?" she asked, her voice smaller than I had ever heard it, small and hollow like an empty crate rattling in an alley. "You had eighty million. You could have lived anywhere in the world. You could have bought a palace in France. You could have had five hundred people like us bowing to you every time you walked into a room."
"I don't want anyone bowing to me, Caroline," I said.
I reached out and touched the brass rail that separated the court from the public.
"I just wanted my mother to walk across a lawn without being told her life wasn't worth the price of your shoes."
I turned toward the doors.
"Daniel," she called out.
I didn't stop.
"Where... where am I supposed to go?"
May you like
I reached the double doors and pushed them outward into the cold, clean noon air of the courthouse steps.
"There’s a room on Tenth Street," I said over my shoulder. "Above the butcher shop. Four dollars a week, cold water in the hall, and the shift at the laundry starts at five-thirty. They’re looking for someone who knows how to mend hems."
