The day a brutal massacre turns Bartonville into a battlefield, Kitty is living with her father in a shack owned by the town’s most powerful family. When the bloodshed is over, the boy Kitty loves lies fatally wounded. But their child will live on. And Tyrone Duncannon’s death will be avenged.
For Richer, for Poorer is the story of Kitty Kellogg Stokes, born into a hardscrabble life in small-town Pennsylvania, who rose to become the most influential woman in the political circles of New York and Washington, DC. When Kitty marries John Stokes Jr., she bears him two sons. So begins a deception that will continue for decades and test the limits of a woman’s desire for revenge—and a mother’s love.
The day a brutal massacre turns Bartonville into a battlefield, Kitty is living with her father in a shack owned by the town’s most powerful family. When the bloodshed is over, the boy Kitty loves lies fatally wounded. But their child will live on. And Tyrone Duncannon’s death will be avenged.
For Richer, for Poorer is the story of Kitty Kellogg Stokes, born into a hardscrabble life in small-town Pennsylvania, who rose to become the most influential woman in the political circles of New York and Washington, DC. When Kitty marries John Stokes Jr., she bears him two sons. So begins a deception that will continue for decades and test the limits of a woman’s desire for revenge—and a mother’s love.
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Overview
The day a brutal massacre turns Bartonville into a battlefield, Kitty is living with her father in a shack owned by the town’s most powerful family. When the bloodshed is over, the boy Kitty loves lies fatally wounded. But their child will live on. And Tyrone Duncannon’s death will be avenged.
For Richer, for Poorer is the story of Kitty Kellogg Stokes, born into a hardscrabble life in small-town Pennsylvania, who rose to become the most influential woman in the political circles of New York and Washington, DC. When Kitty marries John Stokes Jr., she bears him two sons. So begins a deception that will continue for decades and test the limits of a woman’s desire for revenge—and a mother’s love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480470606 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/18/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 489 |
| Sales rank: | 714,112 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
For Richer, For Poorer
A Novel
By Edward Stewart
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1981 Edward StewartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7060-6
CHAPTER 1
"Her."
The finger pointed—not at the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court administering the oath, not at the man taking it, but at a gray-haired woman watching the ceremony from the grandstand on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue.
She sat straight-backed and tall, commanding the space around her with iron pride and dignity. She did not blink away from the ruthless January sunlight or attempt to hide her age-lined face behind dark glasses or a veil. She wore her years exactly as she wore her black Siberian sable, her platinum-set diamond necklace: as an acquisition—defiantly and without apology.
She was seventy-nine, almost as old as the century, and in a frightening way she was beautiful.
"She's my story," Deborah Thomas said. "Sixty-two years ago government soldiers tried to gun her down in Bartonville, Pennsylvania. Today she's watching her son take the inaugural oath."
Deborah Thomas' escort, who happened to be Secretary of State, crinkled a skeptical eyebrow. "You'll never get Kitty Stokes to talk to you."
Dictators and murderers and movie stars routinely jumped through hoops to be interviewed by Deborah Thomas; cardinals on their deathbeds had received her and spilled the goods. "She'll talk—they always talk on the Big Day."
After the ceremony Deborah Thomas slipped a virgin cartridge into her Sony cassette recorder. With a quick apology to the Secretary of State, a promise to meet him back at the reception, she plunged into the human maelstrom. Ahead of her she could see Kitty Stokes shoving aside reporters.
The man from UPI thrust out a mike: "Mrs. Stokes—"
"I don't give interviews."
The woman from the Washington Post: "Mrs. Stokes—"
"I don't give interviews."
Slicing and separating with the flat edge of her well-practiced hand, Deborah Thomas caught up with her quarry. "Mrs. Stokes, we sat next to one another at the Martin Luther King Memorial dinner? I'm Deborah Thomas of NBC Special Projects?"
For one instant their gazes locked together. The old woman radiated stubbornness. Deborah Thomas knew she would have only one question to get her hook in. She raised her voice, shouting over the racket.
"Today, on your own son's inaugural, you were sitting alone. Whose idea was that? Yours? His?"
"Mine," Kitty Stokes said. "Sitting alone at my age helps keep things in historical perspective. Now if you'll excuse me, I don't give interviews." She raised her silver-tipped walking stick and with the threat of a smart slap forced Deborah Thomas aside.
The head of NBC Special Projects lost her balance, stumbled in front of UPI and AP and the Washington Post. "I'll sue that bitch!" she cried.
But there was no need to bluster or try to save face. UPI and AP and the Post were no longer watching Deborah Thomas: their eyes were nailed to the dirty-faced little boy in a floppy checkered hat who had darted around the startled chauffeur and was holding the door of Kitty Stokes's limousine.
"Mrs. Stokes," the boy said in a voice that was barely past piping, "I represent the student newspaper of Thomas Jefferson grade school in Wilmington, Delaware. I've been assigned to interview you."
Kitty Stokes looked at him—a child. She looked back at the circle of reporters—hungering animals. She softened.
"Get into the car. You have three minutes."
The old woman and the little boy got into the car, and after the driver had closed the door the boy opened a small, spiral-bound notepad. His hands were shaking and Kitty Stokes could see he had prepared his questions in a careful looping scrawl.
"The students of Thomas Jefferson congratulate you on the occasion of your son's inauguration." The awkward formality was touching in one so young.
"Thank you," Kitty Stokes said.
"The students of Thomas Jefferson would like to know the single most important thing you've ever done in your life."
After a lifetime a person aches to tell the truth to someone. "Did you ever hear of a place called Bartonville?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No ma'am. I never heard of it."
They don't teach it nowadays, she realized. It may not even be in the history books anymore. No wonder. I paid to have it taken out.
"When I was a young girl in Bartonville, long before you were born ..." She looked at him. "Long before your parents were born ... I made a promise."
There was silence and Pennsylvania Avenue and its crowds and police slid past the sealed windows of the black Lincoln Continental. The boy was obviously disappointed.
"That was the most important thing?"
"Promises can be important," she said, and she thought: Mine was.
The boy shook his head dubiously. "I need specifics—who what why when where and how. What was the promise?"
She was not sure she could bring herself to utter the words of that promise again, not even in memory. She drew in a deep, fortifying breath.
It was not Kitty Stokes's habit to leave a question unanswered any more than it was to leave a job undone. She reached toward the boy and he let her put her hand over his.
"Don't write for a minute," she said.
Mentally, Kitty Kellogg Stokes began to frame her reply; and the boy waited.
CHAPTER 2September of 1922 was a dry month in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the afternoon of the Bartonville massacre was a scorcher.
Kitty Kellogg kept the door and the one window wide open. Still the air in the shack would not stir. Because her dad was there, with his Bible—watching her but pretending not to—she had to invent activities.
She swept the shack twice. The floor was bare earth. A two-foot-square hole had been dug in it and covered with boards. Kitty and her dad stored potatoes beneath the boards, when they had potatoes. They hadn't had any since the strike began. She made the bunks extra-carefully. She dusted the shelves. Finally she sat and pretended to read an old magazine. From the corner of her eye she watched her dad pretending not to watch her.
Annoyance filled her, rising like water in a glass.
She knew why he watched. She was a girl. She was seventeen. If he'd been on the job, if she'd been on hers, there'd have been no need or chance to watch her. But the men were on strike. The company had closed the store where she worked. So he watched. There was love in his watching, and pride. But she sensed something else too: a fear that if he looked the other way, let her out of his sight even an instant, he'd lose her. Maybe not quite the way he'd lost her mother, but lose her just as bad.
Now that her mother was dead he'd become, too late, a good husband: no more drinking, no more women. He spent his free time sitting near the window with his Bible—watching.
Something rumbled far away. Kitty's dad shut the Bible. His hand made a rough red scar against the leather cover.
"Thunder," he said hopefully.
Kitty stared out the window. She could remember the day her dad had broken the glass in a fit of anger. Now the window had cardboard from a Del Monte bean carton. Nails held it in place. They stuck out like thorns. If you wanted the view you had to take the weather too, full in your face.
Today the weather was not a hot autumn stillness. Hundreds of concrete shacks with tarpaper roofs stretched shadows across the dry, bulldozed land. A silence flowed over the earth. It filled the shack and it bothered Kitty. A single thin cloud was beginning to catch the pink of the late-afternoon sun. She thought how clean the colors were up there, as if they'd just been washed.
She thought how she was going to miss her date if she couldn't think up an excuse to get out of the shack.
"Couldn't be thunder," she said. "The sky's clear."
"Couldn't be anything else." Her dad's eyes had kept their child's blue. They made the rest of him gray and weary by contrast.
"Then I'm going to take a walk. Stretch my legs before it rains."
Her dad looked hurt. Better hurt, she thought, than angry. She could handle him hurt. Angry, there was no holding him.
"Seems you've always got somewhere to run off to."
"I ain't been out all day."
He tugged at a damp fold of undershirt. There was black beneath his fingernails, oil crescents that never scrubbed out. "You won't be long now, will you?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen." She knew it would be twenty-five at the soonest. She knew he knew it too.
Her dad's questioning eyes made her feel mean and deceitful. She hurried outdoors, quick while luck was with her.
There was nobody in the lanes between shacks. Not even children; not even dogs. It was the fault of the heat. A day like today, if you could find shade you clung to it, pulled it over you like a tent and went to sleep. Today there wasn't even a horse or wagon down in the road. No need since the company store had put the green shutters up over its windows. There was nothing to buy, nothing to haul.
The only thing the company hadn't managed to shut down was the pump in the dusty town square. It was fed by an underground spring. For the employees of Stokes Petroleum and their families, it was the only water. If you lived in one of the outlying shacks you had to trudge a half mile to the pump and back, and there were times when you'd just as soon do without the washing.
Kitty bent down to the pump. Its curved handle was shiny from a hundred thousand handshakes. She pumped till the water flowed cold. She had herself a long swallow. And then she ran, the only moving thing in the street or fields.
To the west of town, the company geologists had found there was no oil, and trees still grew in a four-acre crescent, a scar of green on the bald, torn earth. The trees looked out of place, idle and graceful among the oil rigs, a last tiny remnant of what had once been a forested plain.
The underbrush in the crescent had grown thick and forbidding, but Kitty could see a pathway recently beaten down. She knew the workmen took turns bringing their girls here. And she knew her sweetheart had other girls besides her. It did not bother her. She knew she was different from the others.
On the day of the massacre Kitty Kellogg crept through the shield of greenbrier. She blinked her eyes and had to stand still a moment. After the burning sunlight of the oil fields the little forest seemed a cave of cool darkness.
At the center of the forest was a spring. Kitty's sweetheart had shown her the spot and they had met here, secretly, through spring and summer.
Tyrone Duncannon was sitting on the far bank. He had propped his feet comfortably against a tree trunk. He was musing as she had seen him do for half hours at a time.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. "Couldn't get away from Dad."
A sunbeam glinted on the spots of gold that flecked his hair. Two dark curves marked the ridges of strength in his shoulders. He was a handsome fellow, Kitty thought, and the miracle was that he was hers in a way he was no other girl's.
He sat there watching while Kitty took off her shoes and waded across the cold spring water to him. He smiled his green eyes at her. She settled herself down beside him. They rested a long moment side by side, barely touching, which made Kitty all the more aware of the faint faraway pressure of his knee.
"You're thinkin' too hard," she said.
"I'm thinkin' we've got to win or we're dead," he said. "There's a rumor Stokes has called for state troops."
"To break the strike?"
"To arrest us. The Governor signed an emergency proclamation. They've built compounds. They're goin' to haul us in trucks to the penitentiary—every damned man, woman and child of us."
"But what have we done wrong? Does it say in the law books you've got to work for Stokes or go to jail?"
"We're on his property."
Kitty looked about her at this airy space, friendly and sheltering and cool and private. And she thought how strange it could be owned by anyone but God.
"All because you want to organize," she marveled. "Well, your union friends'll look out for you. Haven't they given you food and tents, just in case?"
He looked at her. "Food and tents ain't the answer." He began explaining about the crisis of class struggle, instructing her again, just like a priest.
Kitty listened, letting him think it interested her. He had often told her his dreams, and they were different from hers. He dreamed of changing the world, and she dreamed of living in it. He dreamed union dreams: higher wages, better job conditions. She dreamed of him beside her in a brass bed; of a house with a wood floor and running water and, in time, electric lights; of children, lots of children.
He talked a long time and Kitty nodded yes, yes, yes and began to feel ignored. She thought what a waste it was to talk politics in a sanctuary like this. She wondered whether he would try to kiss her. He always tried, and she always liked his trying, but today felt different. She felt an odd disappointment stirring in her belly. She sneaked a teasing finger beneath the neck of his work shirt. His skin felt cool and soft to her touch.
He stopped talking. His eyes were on her blouse, on the white freckled triangle where she had undone two buttons because of the heat. Time and silence enclosed them, swelling, drifting, passing in great waves.
"You've got beautiful breasts, Kitty. You know you're beautiful."
She pulled away from him. She pretended to be annoyed. She always pretended. Secretly she felt pleasure that he wanted her as much as he wanted those other girls. "You'd think you'd never seen female flesh," she said, "the way you carry on."
His hands went around her neck. His lips came down onto hers. Her blood began galloping. She tasted his tongue in her mouth. Her head went dizzy. He rolled halfway on top of her. Through the thin cotton dress she could feel the hard strength of his penis.
For an unresisting moment she pressed back against him. And then she realized how badly she wanted him, not just his arms and mouth, but all of him, everything, now please God now. She yanked free.
"No."
"Oh, Kitty, why the hell not?"
Sparks of sunlight flew across his face like fragments of broken glass.
"You know why not," she said.
"We'll marry, I've told you that. Just wait for this strike to be settled."
"Sure. One day the strike'll be settled and Jesus Christ'll come back to earth and ice cream'll be free and we'll get married. In the meantime you want me to wallow with you like Teresa McCoy and that fat Costello girl. Well, I'm not a whore and you wouldn't want me if I was, so don't ask me to."
He was gawking at her, white-faced. "Who told you about Edie Costello?"
"Everyone knows about you and her. The whole town's laughin'. I got problems enough, thank you." She had to feel sorry for the swift, guilty look on him, so like a boy's. "Oh, Tyrone, I love you and I want you, but I can't."
He was silent a moment. "What if somethin' happens today?"
She sensed slyness: a bargaining. "What's goin' to happen today?"
"What if somethin' happens to me?"
"Don't you try to frighten me, Tyrone Duncannon. If anythin' happens to you I'll—I'll kill myself."
"I'd rather have you alive in my arms," he sighed, "then both of us dead."
"No one's goin' to die."
"You don't know that, Kitty. What if this is the only chance for us ever? Right here, right now?"
She gazed into his eyes, groping for the truth of him. He was different from the Tyrone she'd seen face down bullies and armed police and hold off three drunken thugs with a broken beer bottle. There were tears in the corners of his eyes and when she touched his forehead the skin was cold and studded with sweat.
"Why are you scared, Tyrone?"
His face opened to her. "I'm only scared of losin' you."
He wasn't lying, she could see that. But he was bargaining. Well, she could bargain just as tough.
"You'll marry me?" she said. "Not after some strike is settled, but tonight? We'll go to the church and tell Father Jack what we've done and you'll marry me?"
"I feel married to you already."
"That's not enough. You'll come to the church with me tonight—yes or no?"
He nodded. "I'll come to the church with you tonight."
"Swear—as God is your witness."
"I swear."
She believed him and belief carried her over the threshold of decision. She took one deep breath and braced herself and pressed her mouth against his. It was a kiss with no turning back after it.
He lifted her blouse and kissed her breasts. He unhooked her skirt and she helped him get it off her. She reached between his legs and guided him into her. There was a tearing and a splitting and her lungs gasped. Pain came in a rush. She held to him and did not scream and it passed, leaving only warmth and a completeness stranger and realer than anything she had ever felt or imagined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from For Richer, For Poorer by Edward Stewart. Copyright © 1981 Edward Stewart. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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