Mansions Of The Dead (19 page)

“IT WAS THE WEDDING
of the century,” Henrietta Hall was saying. “Really, it was. It was old Boston on one side and new Boston on the other. You can’t imagine how excited everyone was about it. You would have thought Kitty was Princess Grace or something. And the rumors about the Putnams being against it just made it that much more fun. Everybody was watching Senator Putnam’s face during the ceremony.”

The historian’s bluish-gray hair was pulled back and fixed in a French twist at the back of her skull, her elegant dancer’s neck twisting as she told the story. Sweeney was mesmerized by her thin, gesturing hands, both ring fingers encircled by three or four diamond and sapphire bands.

Henrietta Hall was legendary around the university. She had won a Pulitzer in the 1980s for her biography of Paul Revere. Earlier in her career she had written a definitive history of Boston. But it was her biography of the Putnam/Sheehan family that Sweeney was interested in, and it was to learn more about them that Sweeney had come to the spacious office and sat in a comfortable chair next to a wide picture window, all of which made her painfully aware of her own lowly status and tiny office.

“What’s your interest in the Putnams anyway?”

“Brad was one of my students.”

“Yes. So sad. It’s funny when you’ve written about a family. You almost feel like you’re one of them. I spent five years doing nothing but talking to Putnams, reading Putnam letters, trying to imagine, for purposes of my narrative, what various Putnams were thinking at various times. I was heartbroken when the other son died a few years ago, and when I heard about Brad I felt again as though I’d lost a member of my family.”

Sweeney took a deep breath. “He was working on a project in my class about his family, particularly during the 1800s. He had started to do some very interesting work and I was . . . Well, I was thinking that it would be a way to honor him . . . to finish his work and then have it published under his name somewhere. He was an accomplished scholar.”

“The first Putnam came over on the boat after the
Mayflower
,” Henrietta Hall continued. “He wasn’t anybody very special. He had a farm in Braintree and a whole bunch of children. One of his sons took over the family farm. He had something like ten girls and then, finally, the boy. That was Elijah Putnam. This was after the Revolutionary War of course, and suddenly there were all these opportunities in shipping. Elijah made a fortune trading with Asia and bought up land on Beacon Hill, which was what all of the successful families were doing. The house that Andrew Putnam lives in now was built on that land. They held on to a dozen or so more lots and sold them off. Made a killing.”

“What about the connection to the Back Bay?” Sweeney remembered reading that the Putnams had also bought up a lot of land in the Back Bay.

“Well, Elijah Putnam’s grandson, Charles Putnam, started buying up large tracts of land in the Back Bay in the 1850s, just as urban planners started filling it in. It was all swampy nothingness at that point, but someone had a vision and they just kept bringing in loads of gravel. A lot of the work was done by the new immigrants, Irish mostly. Anyway, over the years, they’ve made a couple of fortunes selling those houses
that Charles Putnam built. I believe that they still own at least a few of them. It’ll be interesting to see what the Back Bay Tunnel project does to their real estate values.”

The hulking cranes and snarled traffic had been a part of Back Bay residents’ lives for so long that Sweeney wondered whether people would actually miss them once the construction crews packed up and went away. But no, the easier access to Cambridge and points north would probably make up for it.

“What about the house in Newport?” Sweeney asked. “When did they build that?”

“Oh, Cliff House was built around the turn of the century, I think. That was Joshua Putnam, Brad’s great-grandfather. His son was Senator John Putnam. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in the early sixties, and then to the Senate in 1972. You probably know all this. He was kind of at the center of a coalition of moderate Republicans from New England but he got voted out of office in the eighties.”

“And Paddy Sheehan?” Sweeney asked. “How does he fit into things?”

She knew that John Putnam’s career had coincided with that of Paddy Sheehan, who had first run for the Senate in the mid-sixties. It had been commented upon many times that the two men represented the past and present of Boston—the original Brahmin ruling elite and the more recently arrived Irish, who would become the public face of the city.

“The original Sheehan—I forget his name—arrived in Boston in 1848,” Henrietta Hall said. “Potato famine probably, or just poverty. He married a girl he’d met on the boat and they settled quietly and un-eventfully into a city split in two—the Brahmins and the Irish. The native-born leaders and those who, buoyed in their efforts by the huge new voting bloc they had brought with them from Kerry and Cork, would become the new leadership of the city.

“As a young man, Paddy Sheehan gained fame and notoriety as a city councilor about whom it was said that that he skirted the law but never broke it, and he was elected to the Senate as a relatively young
man. There, he became a powerful Democrat, wielding influence when his party was in power and finding leverage when it was not.

“Of course it’s the point at which John Putnam’s son, Andrew, and Paddy Sheehan’s daughter, Kitty, fell in love that everybody really got interested.”

“How did they meet?”

“Oh, in college I think. As I was saying before, the wedding was kind of the event of the year. Everyone knew that both fathers were fairly well displeased. But it was a beautiful wedding and whatever else you might say about the Putnams, Andrew and Kitty were deeply in love that day. There was no mistaking it.”

“What do people say?” Sweeney asked slyly.

“Oh, you know. That Paddy Sheehan had a voracious sexual appetite. That he had been drunk at the wedding and had tripped as he’d walked Kitty down the aisle. That Andrew Putnam was believed by his father to be something of a dolt, and though he had gotten through law school, had never lived up to the promise of the family name. That he’s an alcoholic. But that’s all gossip. Most of it anyway.”

“I’m wondering if you know anything about a Putnam ancestor named Edmund Putnam. He was born around 1863 and I’m trying to see what I can discover about him.”

“Edmund, Edmund. Let’s see. It doesn’t ring a bell, but let me check my index.” She took a copy of her book down from the shelf and turned to the back.

“He died very young,” she said. “Only twenty-four, but he had a son before he died. Joshua Putnam. That would be Brad’s great-grandfather.”

“And Edmund was Charles and Belinda Putnam’s son. What do you know about Belinda?”

“Belinda Putnam I remember. She was a very interesting woman, you know. She was widowed young. Only twenty-three. And she was left with a baby to raise and her husband’s law firm. The natural thing, of course, would have been to turn the firm over to one of the partners, but she retained her husband’s stake in it, maintained control
over the family’s extensive properties around the city, including all those Back Bay properties. The Putnams really were instrumental in creating the Back Bay as it is today.”

“Or instrumental in paying Irish laborers almost nothing to do it,” Sweeney said grouchily. She’d read accounts of Irish immigrants doing backbreaking work hauling fill to make the Back Bay neighborhood.

“Yes,” Henrietta said. “But history never remembers those who toil, does it? I read a wonderful book recently about the men who built the White House. Fascinating. Anyway, there was quite a lot of Putnam money and Belinda lived alone for the rest of her life. There were marriage proposals of course, but she chose not to accept. She became an important benefactor in the city, you know. Gave to all kinds of charities and started her own, a home for unwed mothers. And something for African-American women in Newport, if I remember correctly. An education fund. Everything I read about her led me to believe that she was a remarkable woman.”

“I haven’t been able to find her gravestone,” Sweeney said. “Do you know where it is?”

“The family has a plot at Mount Auburn, I think.”

“Yes, and I found Charles’s grave, and Edmund’s, but not Belinda’s. Can you think of any reason why she might have been buried somewhere other than the Putnam family plot?”

“I suppose it’s possible she was buried in her own family’s plot somewhere. Her maiden name was Cogswell, if I remember correctly. Her father was in shipping, I think. Very wealthy at one point and then lost everything. It always seemed to me that she must have married Charles Putnam for his money. He was so much older and he didn’t live long after the marriage.”

“And do you have any idea where the Cogswells might have had their cemetery plot?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t.”

Sweeney got up to go. “Thanks so much for your help,” she said and wrote her e-mail and phone number down on a slip of paper. “If you think of anything else, let me know.”

“Of course. Now can I ask why Brad was writing about her in your class?”

“Sorry,” Sweeney said. “He had gotten interested in a collection of mourning jewelry that had been owned by her.” She felt suddenly nervous. The police could only keep that aspect of the murder quiet for so long.

“Oh yes. I’ve always liked mourning jewelry. There’s a portrait of her, you know. At the MFA. By Sargent.”

“Really? I can’t believe I’ve never seen it.”

“It was recently donated. By the family, I think.”

“I’ll head over this afternoon,” Sweeney said, thanking her. “And let me know if you remember anything else about her.”

The day had started out bright and sunny and by noon it was seventy degrees. Sweeney, who didn’t like the heat, found that she was relieved to step into the marble foyer of the Museum of Fine Arts. The gray and palest pink floors seemed to draw the heat away and she surreptitiously slipped a foot out of her sandals and pressed it to the cool stone.

Sweeney had spent so much time at the MFA over the years that she always felt as though she were visiting a friend’s house. She said hello to the bronze replica of Frederick William MacMonnies’s
Bacchante and Infant Faun
in the entryway, recalling the uproar that the original of the sculpture had caused when it was donated to the Boston Public Library in 1896. The skipping, nude woman, clutching a bunch of grapes in one careless hand and a nude infant in the other, had divided the city, with some leaders calling it a glorification of vice and harlotry and others hailing it as a great work of art.

On her way up to the rotunda, she stopped to greet Bela Lyon Pratt’s
Water Lily Girl
and Hiram Powers’s bust of
Eve Disconsolate
. She stood for a moment looking up at the Sargent murals painted and sculpted in relief on the concave dome. Whenever she brought people to the MFA and told them that the murals had been painted by Singer
Sargent, he of the society portraits of bored women staring off into the distance, she was always met with disbelief.

She had always loved coming to the MFA and looking at the Sargents, especially the women. And she had always thought that his portraits of Boston’s elite, with their combination of well-heeled circumspection and caged intelligence—said more about the experience of being female than did a whole library of feminist texts.

Wanting to prolong the anticipation of seeing Belinda Putnam’s portrait, Sweeney wandered downstairs and out into the Garden Court. It was almost empty, most of the visitors having fled the heat for the cooler halls of the museum, but Sweeney strolled the perimeter, letting the sound of splashing water in the fountains surround her.

She sat down on one of the stone benches and found herself wondering if Ian had ever been to the MFA. He probably had, he was an art dealer after all, but she found herself wishing that she could bring him here for the first time, see his face as she led him up into the rotunda and showed him the murals, as she took him out into the Garden Court.

What did that mean? She wasn’t sure and she realized she was going to have to decide what to do about the letter. It had been sitting on her kitchen table and she hadn’t read it again since the first time.

When she thought of Ian, she thought of her confusion during those weeks in Vermont. It was as though all of their blindness as to what had really happened had seeped into her feelings about him.

She had been attracted to him—or had she? Had that just been the murders too? She was discovering that crisis set up its own universe. You couldn’t trust the way you responded to someone in a crisis, could you? She couldn’t honestly say what she was feeling for him. She didn’t know. And until she knew, she couldn’t do anything.

He was so different from Colm. That was part of what was throwing her, she realized. She had loved Colm because he was loud and raucous and hard-drinking and hard-living. Ian was . . . different.

And then there were her slightly confused feelings for Jack Putnam. She’d realized, when she saw him at the house after the memorial service,
that she had been looking forward to seeing him. She was attracted to him; in fact it was hard to imagine anyone whose tastes ran to men not being attracted to him, but there was something else there too, a sense of recognition. Talking to him at Katie’s wedding, she had felt instantly comfortable with him, instantly at ease.

They’d had a drink and laughed about their exes hating them. They had stood out on the lawn while he smoked and she had felt more alive than she had in months. Shocked, she realized that he reminded her of Colm. He had the same energy, the same intense creativity, the same directness.

She took a deep breath. It was all too much to think about, and she decided to focus on the Putnam family instead.

She made her way back into the museum and to the ground-floor room that held the Sargents. Sweeney searched the room quickly for the Belinda Putnam portrait. It was the only one she hadn’t seen before and she spotted it right away. From across the room, it gave the impression of being very dark, the background of brown wallpaper and furniture blending with the woman’s dark dress. But as Sweeney got closer, she saw the subtle lighting of the woman’s hair and clothes.