Harrison, so elegantly named for his English maternal grandfather, knew he wouldn’t be on the farm for long. When he was through cleaning the horses’ stalls and feeding them for the night, he would sink into the fresh straw in the barn’s loft and open his schoolbooks. Education was the only way to escape a life as brutal as the one his father had endured, and so he plunged into his schoolwork with a fever. Shakespeare tonight, then.
Inside the house, his mother, Gloria, was where she always was at that time of day, standing in front of pots simmering on the stove. She and her son talked about his schoolwork, books, literature, and history—things they both loved.
Gloria was determined that her son get a good education, and because of that, she had struck a bargain with her husband years earlier, a bargain she knew was destined to crumble like the lie that it was. The boy would do his chores and help out as much as possible during his school years, she told her husband. After that, he would join his father on the farm full time. She told her husband this although she knew it to be untrue, putting off the inevitable explosion when Harrison’s real intentions, and Gloria’s dreams for him, were finally revealed.
Claus had come in from the fields one evening not long after his son had graduated from high school to find the boy standing in the kitchen with a suitcase. Off to college, just as his mother had planned.
The enormous Claus leaped on his son then, inflicting blow after blow. He was awakened from this all-consuming violence by his wife, who stopped the beating by grabbing her husband’s rifle that hung above the fireplace and firing two shots into the air. Gloria was fully prepared to shoot to kill if necessary. Luckily for Claus, it was not. Harrison left the farm that evening and never returned.
He attended the university in the large city that was a few hundred miles, yet an entire world, away from his home. He earned a business degree and, immediately after graduation, got a job with a large, locally owned shipping company, Canby Lines, hauling grain （some of which his own father had farmed, coincidentally） across the Great Lakes.
In very short order, Harrison’s charm, good looks, business savvy, and, some would say, carefully honed skills of manipulation and deception catapulted him to the position of company president, reporting only to James Canby, a widower who had founded the company and had recently taken young Harrison under his wing. It didn’t hurt that Harrison was romancing Canby’s daughter, Celeste, a plain, shy young thing who had never had much attention from the opposite sex. With Canby’s blessing, Harrison asked Celeste to marry him, thus cementing his position as heir to the company throne.
The union was carefully calculated, but Harrison looked upon it as simple survival. He would do anything to avoid going back to the farm—not that it was ever really a consideration, what with his education and business experience. Even if he had, say, lost this particular job, he could’ve simply walked into another, without going to the extreme of marrying the boss’s daughter. But Harrison’s early life had left him with certain scars that reason and clear thinking couldn’t erase. Thus, when he saw that the road to his own ultimate security began with ingratiating himself with Canby and ended with marriage to Celeste, he simply took the opportunity that was so obviously in front of him.
Not long after the young couple returned from their European honeymoon, Canby suffered a massive stroke at the office. Harrison and Celeste were at his side at the end. His last words were to his young protégé:
“Take care of her,” Canby whispered.
“I will, sir,” Harrison promised. And then the old man was dead.
Harrison meant what he had said. That he did not love Celeste was of no consequence to him. He was indebted to her. Because of their marriage, her father’s company now belonged to him. Not only was he safe from his irrational fear of sinking back into farm life—he had a recurring nightmare that he had turned into his father, German accent and all—Harrison had become the first millionaire on either side of his family tree. He began sending money to his mother every month and continued to do so until she passed away, fifteen years after her husband died of a heart attack in the fields. Those last years were nearly the happiest of her life—rivaling only her first few years of marriage to a carefree, determined young immigrant who had not yet been turned so bitter, so vengeful, so angry by the land he had chosen to farm.
Harrison always smiled when he thought of the fact that Gloria died kicking up her heels at a town dance. She sold the farm immediately after Claus’s death and moved into a small apartment in town, which she decorated in the sort of lively floral prints and gaily striped patterns that her husband would never allow in their home. She did not remarry—why should she listen to someone else complain that she hadn’t washed his stockings correctly?—and instead played the organ at the white wooden church each Sunday morning, volunteered to help with bake sales, fundraisers, and other church events, and organized town dances, held in the high school gymnasium every Saturday night. It was at one of these events, while dancing with a man young enough to be her son, that she slipped away.
She died with a smile on her face, right there in the middle of the dance floor. People thought she was smiling because she was having such a wonderful time dancing, and that was true. But it was also true that Gloria Connor was smiling because, at the moment of her passing, she was greeted on the other side by Claus, young and vibrant again, who took her by the hand, twirled her across the dance floor, and said to her, “I’ve had such a good time watching you these past fifteen years, Gloria. You really knew how to live. Pity that I didn’t. Shall we live it up now?”
Meanwhile, Harrison was busy using the same kind of determination that had gotten him to his lofty position to create a happy life for Celeste. She deserved as much. When he was still a young man, Harrison Connor built his enormous, Victorian-style home high on a hill overlooking the harbor in Wharton. Its most distinguishing feature was its expansive porch that wrapped around three sides of the house, offering a view of the harbor from every direction. Harrison was often seen pacing from one end of the porch to the other, spyglass in hand, watching his fleet of ships steaming toward their destinations.
Harrison might have built a house for Celeste in a larger city, but he built this home in Wharton for the same reason many other people were drawn there—the unusually warm winds. Celeste had never fully recovered from a bout of influenza that had overtaken her shortly after her father’s funeral, and he thought that Wharton’s warm climate would be just the thing to buoy her health. He was wrong about this.
Celeste remained in frail health throughout much of her life, especially after the birth of their only surviving daughter, Hadley. Before the girl was born, Harrison and Celeste kept company with many young couples in Wharton, entertaining, throwing dinner parties, and generally keeping up their social obligations as befitting Harrison’s standing as the town’s largest employer. But after the child came into their lives, all of that ceased. The pregnancy had been difficult and draining for Celeste, and she no longer had the vibrancy and energy necessary to entertain. There were mental issues as well, known only to Harrison. A kind of madness had overtaken her after the birth of their first child. She never came out of it, was never quite right again. It was as though fiction and fact comingled in her mind, and she seemed not to be able to differentiate one from the other.