The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery

Author:Brian Francis Slattery
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: novel, thriller, cleveland, ohio, mafia, mistaken identity, crime, organized crime, fiction, family, secrets, capitalism, money, power, greed, literary
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Caroline Anderson is only fifteen in March 1922. She’s the youngest of three. Her sister Cecily is twenty-three, outspoken, progressive, a member of the League of Women Voters of Cleveland; is still, now and again, talking about the election of 1920. She voted for James M. Cox, newspaperman, Democrat, former governor of Ohio, and has decided she hates Warren G. Harding, even if he’s from Ohio too, and a newspaperman, and a very popular president who won in a mammoth landslide. There’s just something about him, she says. Too much of a man. A month later, when The Wall Street Journal breaks the story that one of Harding’s boys, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, leased some land in Wyoming to another of Harding’s boys, Harry Sinclair, an oilman, Cecily smiles. See, I told you. Too much of a man. It’s a gutsy thing to say at the time. Nobody knows about the kickbacks yet, and nobody’s asking how Fall got so rich. Jess Smith is still alive—he’ll be found shot in the head eleven months from now, with people haggling over whether it’s a murder or a suicide—so there’s no talk about just how Smith’s boss, Harry Daugherty, Republican party hotshot made attorney general, is connected to bootlegging. Teapot Dome isn’t a household word yet, or the Little Green House on K Street. Smoke-filled room hasn’t become a cliché instead of just referring to the room in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, where, they say, a bunch of senators got together to arrange Harding’s nomination. Even after all these things have happened, people won’t decide Harding was a lousy president for years. He’ll be long gone by then. His own sudden death in San Francisco—in mid-sentence while talking to his wife, some will say, though it seems nobody’s really sure what happened to him—is only seventeen months away. But when it all comes out, Cecily smiles, raises her eyebrows, shakes her head, a heady mix of disgust and smug satisfaction. I told you all he was like this, and you didn’t believe me. She doesn’t see through Peter Henry Hightower, though.

Their older brother, William, brings Peter to the family’s house for dinner in April 1923, after a few months of talking about him. This charming man, a little roguish, from Connecticut, William tells the family. Seems to have gotten through Yale without anyone knowing who he was, which is a little hard to square with his ambition, though not with his intelligence. A very intriguing man, savvy and wary, but willing to take some risks; also, he seems to be sitting on a rather large amount of capital, which, as William puts it, isn’t being exploited to its full potential.

“I would very much like to go into business with him,” William says. He doesn’t say that he met Peter in a speakeasy.

“You’re saying he’s your ticket,” Cecily says.

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“I know.”

Cecily teases William because it’s so obvious how much he wants to be rich. It’s also obvious that he can’t do it by himself.

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