The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion Read Online Free PDF Page A

as he is pleased to be known to the press and public, has a pawkish sense of humor. Chuckling, he produces the pencil he used to tally the vote and scribbles a name on the back of the telegram: “John Tyler McNear, Esq.”
    He reckoned he never knew a better day, and that fate demanded a steep price. In 1860, the year the Republican Party gave Abraham Lincoln to America, McNear’s wife, Geneva, a daughter of one of the city’s founding French families, was killed when the streetcar she was riding jumped the tracks; she was pregnant with a daughter, who perished also. McNear was serving as a state senator, and came home from Springfield to find himself a stranger to his fifteen-year-old son, a dreamy sort of lad who had spoken French exclusively until he was five. He was promptly shipped off to a boarding school in Rockford. There he failed consistently at mathematics, humiliating his father, the former comptroller, but scored well in history and drama, where his performance as Dr. Faustus on the school’s amateur stage drew an enthusiastic review from the
Rockford Evening Gazette
. McNear, who did not attend, consoled himself that the young man might become a decent orator, but his hopes were shattered when John was expelled for theft.
    Summoned before his father to explain himself, he confessed that after his exit in Act IV, he’d removed a number of valuable items from pockets in the cloakroom, and that a silver snuffboxbelonging to a patron had been found in his rooms. McNear beat him severely with his belt, and later beat him again when the school superintendent wrote to report that Master McNear had not committed the crime in person, but had seduced the young lady who played the Good Angel into performing the task while he was soliloquizing onstage; the young lady had come forward upon her own, hoping that the truth would lead to Master McNear’s reinstatement.
    â€œYou filthy pup!” sputtered the old man, when his arm faltered. “Is that what they taught you up in Rockford?”
    John Tyler, it’s said, touched his torn lip with a handkerchief. “Actually, I believe it was in your suite at the Winston, the night the party nominated Douglas. I learned a great deal that evening.”
    That evening, Scipio Africanus McNear suffered the first of several strokes that would force him to retire from public life at the age of fifty-eight. His investments during the cattle boom that followed the War Between the States allowed him to live the life of a wealthy invalid on Lakeshore Drive, with nursing care around the clock, and to pay his son an allowance to keep him away from home. Then came the fire. When the company through which he’d insured his pens and meatpacking plants defaulted on all its claims, the prospect of an impoverished old age brought on the stroke that killed McNear on the eve of his seventieth birthday. His former colleagues contributed to a collection to bury him in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, sparing him a pauper’s grave on Blue Island.
    John Tyler did not attend. He spent the day of the funeral in a banquet room at the newly rebuilt Palmer House Hotel, treating his friends to a champagne supper with the last of the money given him by his father. For years, he’d used his mother’s maiden name, Vermillion. None of his guests knew of his loss, and hiswomen friends, who imagined they shared the secrets of his heart, were not aware he was related to one of those vulgar political creatures their fathers condemned at garden parties.
    His descent from that point was vertical.
    His male friends were not disposed to help him out. For some time, objects of value had had a habit of going missing when he was present—a watch here, an unattended banknote there. Such trinkets were considered dispensable in their set, and their principles differed sharply from those of the previous generation. Like John’s, their family connections had released them from