From This Moment (8 page)

And he knew an artist who would be perfect for the job. Most
artists of Stella West’s caliber would have nothing but scorn for designing a lowly advertisement, but she might pounce on the opportunity if he dangled the possibility of an introduction to Dr. Lentz in exchange for the job.

Stella had been interfering with his concentration repeatedly during the past two days since he’d abandoned her in that pub, and now she haunted his thoughts as he walked to his office. She had an ego the size of Manhattan, but he liked that about her.

She had to be handled with care or she could take a wrecking ball to his reputation. It had taken years to cultivate a network of friends and professional allies who helped make
Scientific World
soar, and Stella’s assumption that he’d risk that on her behalf was annoying. Introducing Stella to Dr. Lentz would be like tossing the young doctor a grenade. Dr. Lentz was a nice man, and Stella was a force of nature. She seemed uniquely skilled at annoying people during her short stint in Boston, which wasn’t his style of business. He used honey to attract friends, while Stella seemed to fling vinegar wherever she went.

But he still wanted her working for
Scientific World
, no matter how challenging her personality. Offering her the advertising commission in exchange for an introduction to Dr. Lentz could be the first step toward getting her permanently added to his staff at the magazine.

Despite his attraction to Stella, Romulus knew she would be off-limits if she worked at
Scientific World.
Dallying with someone who reported to him would be asking for trouble. He sensed that she had the ability to disrupt his hard-won equilibrium, and he’d invested too much into creating the perfect life to let any woman interfere with that.

The four-story building that housed
Scientific World
occupied a prime lot on Tremont Street. Like most of the buildings on the street, it was fronted with ornamental columns and deeply carved cornices. It contained a modern passenger elevator, but Romulus rarely used it. By walking up the staircase, he could indulge in listening to all the wonderful sounds of production as he climbed to the managerial offices on the top floor.

A café, a stationer’s shop, and a pharmacy occupied the ground floor of the building, but the other three floors were the dominion of
Scientific World.
As he climbed past the second floor, he could hear the steady thump and whirl of the electrotype-processing machine pumping out thousands of pages soon to be bound into individual issues of the magazine. The third floor was the domain of the artists who illustrated each article that appeared in the magazine. The clacking of typewriter keys from the writers on the top floor gave evidence to the world of science that was being committed to text and soon to be sent out to all corners of the world.

Romulus strode through the front door to the main office, an oversized room filled with desks for the writers and managerial staff. As usual, he’d arrived before Evelyn. Her desk was placed squarely in the front of the bustling office so she could keep an eye on everything, but Romulus needed to work in silence. He was the only person in the managerial wing with a private office, but having a door he could close was a necessity. It was too easy to get distracted by the conversations around him, and he’d never get anything done if he was out on the floor with the others.

Each morning as he unlocked the door to his private office, he marveled at how he’d managed to arrive at this pinnacle of success. As a child, he’d made terrible grades in school, always too distracted by what was going on outside the window to pay
attention to a teacher droning on about nouns and verbs and ancient history. All he cared about was the end of the school day, when he could escape into the natural wonders of his own backyard. On the weekends, he and Evelyn hunted through bookstores for every volume that shed insight into the wonders of the world around them. While other children daydreamed about King Arthur or the Count of Monte Cristo, Romulus was spellbound by the feats of Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison. He and Evelyn lived in the greatest age of innovation the world had ever seen, and they awaited each new shipment of books with the anticipation of Christmas morning.

When he was thirteen, he spent his allowance on a subscription to a newsletter that printed summaries of recently filed patents. At that time,
Scientific World
had been a flimsy publication, a mere sixteen pages in each issue. The editor was a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and he wrote brief comments beneath each featured patent, speculating on the invention’s commercial viability. Romulus’s favorite parts of the newsletter were the letters submitted by fellow readers, who shared their thoughts about the featured patents. He and Evelyn devoured each issue cover to cover, often writing their own letters to the editor.

Romulus had soared with elation when, at fifteen years old, he opened the newsletter and saw his letter to the editor printed for all the world to see. Evelyn had squealed with glee, carrying it to every bookstore and newsstand in town to brag about her cousin’s accomplishment. He ought to have been embarrassed by her hero worship, but no, it was wonderful. He clipped that letter from the newsletter and hung it on the wall of his bedroom, staring at it before he went to sleep each night, dreaming about what his life would be like someday. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, but staring at that letter gave him hope.

It meant that maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be the profound failure his father thought he would become. Having grown up in West Point with a colonel as a father, Romulus had been expected to outgrow his foolish interest in nature and become a man by joining the army. His mother didn’t care what he did, but she was mortified by the terrible grades he made throughout primary school. Who could concentrate on mathematics and grammar when monarch butterflies fluttered just outside the window? He was an embarrassment to her in the closely knit town where the children of officers were held up and compared like melons at the local market.

He was relieved to leave home at eighteen for Harvard. His father had to pull a lot of strings to get him in, giving him a stiff lecture to buckle down and quit embarrassing the family with his foolish inattention and lack of discipline.

Romulus went to college with an abundance of natural curiosity but a complete inability to focus on any one field. He began studying chemistry until botany snagged his interest instead. That lasted a little more than a year, and then a new program in animal science was introduced to the college, and he enrolled in every class he could. His nomadic interest across all fields of science was a wonderful adventure, but not a practical one. How could he translate his unwieldy interests into gainful employment?

As graduation loomed, his anxiety grew. He had no practical skills, no hope of useful employment. Laura was the daughter of a Harvard professor and began fretting that they couldn’t get married if Romulus was incapable of supporting a family. He masked his unease with a cocky grin and an endless stream of jokes, but right before graduation there was no more room for humor. Laura threw him over. He was unemployed, and his father’s patience was growing thin. He couldn’t sleep at night,
suffering from the withering fear that he was about to be unmasked as the hopeless failure his father had always claimed.

Then came the notice that the
Scientific World
newsletter was about to go out of business, and a spark of inspiration struck. Evelyn had just gotten married to his best friend Clyde Brixton, a man who shared their obsessive fascination with science and technology. Romulus was perpetually low on funds, but Clyde had a job. As an enlisted soldier in the army, Clyde’s salary was a pittance, but he had managed to save a few dollars. Between the three of them, they pooled their money, pawned some furniture, and gathered the hundred dollars necessary to buy the failing newsletter.

Romulus hopped on a train that very day and arrived in Washington by nightfall. By the end of the next day, his wallet was drained, but he possessed the subscription list to
Scientific World
, complete with the rights of ownership and distribution. He intended to grow it beyond the reports of patents into a magazine that would feature articles he and Clyde wrote about science and nature. Romulus persuaded some professors from Yale and Harvard to contribute articles, too. Their page count doubled, then quadrupled. As the magazine’s prestige grew, advertisers came knocking. Nine years later, they had grown the subscription list from a paltry 300 names to 160,000.

And although he and Evelyn were usually brilliant collaborators, their partnership could be shaky. The weekly meetings to discuss the magazine were almost always torture, and one was scheduled to begin in a few minutes. Romulus shifted in his office chair, fiddling with the miniature gyroscope on his desk. His office was a reflection of his interests, and his desk was littered with various oddities he’d collected over the years. A chunk of petrified wood from Siberia. The jaw of an iguana from Mexico. The upper half of his office wall was a glass
window overlooking the interior of the fourth floor, so he had a perfect view as Evelyn gathered her reading glasses and the production schedule and started heading his way. She rapped on his office door and entered.

“Hello, dearest,” he said with a wide smile.

She froze and looked at him over the top of her spectacles. Despite the schoolmarm outfit and narrow, rectangular spectacles, Evelyn was the picture of elegance as she swanned about the office. Always graceful, always in control.

“You’re up to something,” she said as she closed his office door. “You never call me
dearest
unless there’s something you need.”

He pretended to be hurt. “Dearest . . .” he drawled in his most soothing voice. Yes, he was up to something. He needed to inform her that the advertising revenue from Stallworth’s Fertilizer would now be paid in installments and reduced by thirty percent, and it wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation.

Evelyn set the weekly calendar on his desk and pulled up a chair opposite him. “A team of Italian chemists are visiting Harvard,” she said. “They’ve got some interesting theories on helium, and I’ve arranged for you to meet them on Tuesday. On Wednesday, you’ve got an interview with the physician who is trying to develop a new vaccine for diphtheria. You might want to watch out for him. I have a sense he is using us for publicity, rather than dissemination of information. And the new electroplating press is due to arrive next week. They’ll need another payment before they deliver it. It’s a steep bill, but I can juggle our other payments until we have the revenue from next month’s subscriptions.”

This probably wasn’t the ideal time to inform Evelyn that he’d offered Stallworth’s Fertilizer a lower price in exchange for a long-term contract, but she needed to know. He used his
most placating voice as he told her the news. It still didn’t go over well.

“When were you planning on telling me?” she demanded, rising a few inches out of her seat. “I’ve scheduled payments for the electroplating press through the end of the fiscal year. You can’t adjust our advertising revenue without telling me.”

He smiled tightly. “Evelyn? The contract was signed only this morning. I made the decision to offer a lower rate because we will collect more money in the long run. I am not so innumerate that I would have sold us into the poorhouse.”

The fire eased, and her head drooped a little. “I’m sorry, Rom. I don’t know why I’m so tightly wound. It just seems that as the magazine grows bigger, so do the problems. I’m terrified of making a mistake.”

The anxiety in her voice tugged at him. Ever since she’d been a little girl, he had tried to protect her, and some things never changed. “Do you remember our first month in business when we had only three hundred subscribers and not a single advertiser? We would have
killed
for these problems.”

Her smile was soft as she met his eyes across the desk. It had been a glorious time, running the magazine out of the two-room apartment Evelyn shared with her husband. The publication was a mere sixteen pages back then, hand-typed and copied at a rotary copperplate press they rented by the hour. They addressed each issue by hand, snacking late into the night on German pretzels because that was all they could afford until the next batch of payments arrived.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Evelyn conceded. “But please,
please
 . . . we need to lock down the finances. It seems like each month our expenses keep soaring.”

“So does our subscription base.”

“Nevertheless. We’re still paying for the silly parquet floor
you were so adamant on getting. Who even notices that it mimics crystalline structures?”

“The floor has been budgeted and accounted for.”

“It was still a stunning waste. I’m sick of paying that monthly bill.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her about the floor again. Evelyn’s extraordinary mind for detail had a downside, for she remembered every offense and could drag it out to wave it like a red cape before a bull. The floor had been installed two years ago. They’d waged a battle over it, but he’d trimmed expenses in their mailing account in order to make her happy. It should have been settled two years ago, but she brought up his gorgeous, handmade parquet floor every time she fretted about money.