The Decline of Empire

The Decline of Empire A Fiction By Amos Gambol cover painting by Harry Sunter painting circa 1885 from SDC Galleries PREFACE The names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This novel is dedicated to Julius D. Campbell First edition, Andrews B. Campbell copyright 2018, applicable also to all derivative use 2018 Tempus Perdue I am white haired and have hearing aids. I am old enough not infrequently to forget how old I am but I remember well years I spent a friend of Amos Gambol, whom I came to know as a local lawyer resident many years in rural Maine. He entrusted to me the following manuscript, when I last saw him. He explained emphatically he had tried to create a novel not an autobiography and ... to capture the feeling of love in the midst of its betrayal. I found the story and still do: haunting. THE DARK AGES -1950s “Do you want to be beaten like a gong?” asked Mr. Parrott, my boarding school teacher, as if incredulous, when I sought his help. In fact, they beat me like a gong. Those smooth, sarcastic, rich, cruel Long Island bastards. "Honor, duty, service," in other words, responsibility. The ledger sheet of freedom. The other side of the balance. Only, despite all the advantages, I had never known freedom. Always constriction and expansion, movement and rest, coming together and blowing out. That is the way it is. Amos was fourteen years old. ...wore the Gold emblazoned 1 school Shield upon his blue blazer, and school tie. Now, during my time, these things have become a matter of commerce. Then they were a sign of aristocratic privilege. And service. We allowed a few qualified negroes in. No women. No openly homosexual males. All us boys had closets full of clothes, like prisoners, who adorn their cells with pinups, we dressed in Madras and had Bull fighting Posters. ... The young men were impressive athletes. Amos became one. Joshua called Jocko for short, one of his elder brothers, drew and painted these young men. And mastered an immense sense of action in the drawn line and a flowing and graceful cursive in his writing... ... Amos is new at the school, settling into my assigned dorm room... Across the hall, scion of a very rich family, one Nick Von Schmidt from Gross Point, much favored by the Assistant Head so called, who liked to visit there, had had hidden the radio tubes from the radio his assigned blind roommate, Newt, was building. Newt, futilely searching, timidly bashed around the room . Sychophantic, strong but not muscular, handsome and attractive enough maybe to get a girl, but most surely able and happy to inflict punishment - Nicky’s sycophantic friends they put furniture 2 in Newt’s path, and blind Newt got more and more furious. These cruel kids were scarey. Amos leaves the room, but it is horrible to hear blind Newt squeal like a trapped pig, as him behind closed doors they poke and make fun of him... Later that eveneing as every evening, we go to Chapel, a hymns and some prayers ... Blind Newt like many blind people didn't know what he looked like. He looked funny. He looked like Tweedledum - round and fat and overweight... Tapping around with his cane, expressionless, until eventually he got a seeing eye dog but he treated the dog with iron discipline, and worse than his school mates treated him. Newt was not so likeable. Amos was across that hallway fom blind Newt for a year. Watched, listened as the torture continued. Newt would hobble around his room, thrashing, trying to find his assailants, who, in the surrounding blind darkness, would poke and jab him. Someone gooses him. He swings completely mad, thrashing, kicking, swinging and wildly missing the invisible assaillants .... The bully had his point. But Karma dealt him years later, Amos heard, a painful lingering death of gut cancer. 3 Physical differences were not an advantage at Boarding School. Kids at that age are conformists, barely over the age where they have crushes on each other. In grade school, Amos had been called "Fuzzy" and “Rat face” for years when his two front teeth came in. He was dubbed "Bald Eagle," when he failed to reach puberty until age seventeen. It was quite obvious in the showers that I had no pubic hair. Miles Lansky, a particularly cruel young man made him bow even from across a big school room at the snap of his fingers. If Amos had not kowtowed, he would later bend Amos arm and ridicule him. Amos was miserable and terribly homesick for the first year away. Unlike his contemporaries, even though they were unsuccessful in their attempts, Amos could not have sex yet if he had wanted to. Not that girls did not like him; he was cute and easily fell in love even though the transition to a man had not fully taken place. Oh Youth, indeed, the beautiful side of life, the most beautiful side of love! Even unrequited. "Intermarriage. The same blood. Why, they are all cousins, the Germans, the English, the French." That's what 4 Joshua Calvin Gambol, "the old man," or “Pa,” as Amos’ called his father from the time he read Huck Finn on, from upstate New York, had to say about Royalty, including his Scottish and British antecedents. His uncle, Amos’ great uncle Graham Forbes, at the turn of the Twentieth Century had run the Gambol Gaulscott Mills until debt, to so called Factors, financers of the business, ran the Mills into the ground, as all the wool business went south where labor was cheaper ... Jane, Graham’s wife, outlived him and belatedly moved to New York City, where her brother, had been a broker on “the Curb,” the American Stock Exchange. Amos’ father would proudly speak of the honesty of these markets where with a hand signal a sale or purchase for thousands of dollars would be made and honored. James had become very wealthy trading on the Curb but then lost his fortune on Black Thursday in 1929. when, having ordered that no one contact him while he spent the week with his young and beautiful French ward, no one could find him as the stock market collapsed. James and Jane shared Christmas and Easter meals with Amos’ family. Jane’s false teeth clicked and clacked. Jane loved 5 to talk. False teeth didn't fit very well in those days... James taught Amos to play chess and took him out to lunch at Larree’s French Restaurant near the Plaza at the bottom of Central Park. Uncle James wore spats and drank martinis until he could barely totter home. The Gambols moved down from Upstate to the thriving metropolis of New York City after the Second World War when everything up state was still pretty broke. There, Amos’ father supported Uncle James and Aunt Jane. Amos’ mother Sofia, like his father was pretty happy to get out of Upstate to the City, where she was a member of the very social Colonial Cosmo Club, and could entertain friends. There Amos as a boy attended dancing school in the Cosmo Club ball room, under the watchful eye of Instructor Count Kosimo VonderPoot, and his stylish wife Melania. Kosimo was known for having held one miscreant boy upside down by the heels disgorging water pistols from his pockets as they slammed to the floor. Kosimo had black tie formal dances at the end of each season’s set of classes where, after the evening’s foxtrots, waltzes, tangos and sambas, high society bandleader Lester Lanin passed out his famous brightly 6 colored beanies and as if by magic, these hats suddently appeared, atop the heads of boys and girls as the band played Good Night Ladies, and couples glided around the dance room, cheek to cheek, sprayed in swirling colors like irridescent autumn leaves by the whirling ceiling lantern. Kosimo even had the the Everly Brothers come to sing at one of the dances. Sofia Gambol offered the advantages of Society to her youngest son, Amos. Amos drilled and marched with other scions of wealthy New Yorkers in the fashionable Knickerbocker Grays, run along with Adirondak summer camp, where the entrepreneurual Major Warble was also the grand sachem, appearing andpresiding in Native American Headress on a cliff above the awaiting boys at a firelit night ceremony where we were initiated by walking across hot coals. Amos was in. Sofia Gambol was listed in the New York Social Register, listing, which was rigidly controlled by two unknown dowagers, who determined who was socially acceptable. If you were in, you were in. But you surely weren’t black, pretty surely weren’t Jewish, and probably were a snob. The question of drugs had not materialized in the world of 7 Amos' youth, 1940s, except in Jazz and the Jazz dives of the City. Men just drunk themselves crazy. Maybe women were out of it on pills but it was not talked of. Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s was gone. Joshua Gambol was not particular but he never showed an objection to whisky. With ample excuse, given everyone in his family had gone bust around him before and during the First World War in which he served, that he had lost an eye, been cut open for a tumor, and had tuberculosis before he reached forty years of age, he drank without apology.

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