A sign was up when next Mrs. Whittaker went to Deal. The senior Whittaker had ordered a brick wall six feet high and eight feet long on the sand beside the road. Mounted on it was a bronze sign, cast as a rush order and special favor to Whittaker by the Baldwin Locomotive Works:
SUMMER PLACE WHITTAKER “It would have taken six men and God only knows how much`:1 money to take it down, and your father knew it,” Mitzi Whittaker had often told her sons. It was one of her favorite stories, and every time that Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr., passed the sign he thought of his mother telling that story.
He remembered the sign when it stood alone on the sand. Now there was a fence, brick pillars every twenty-five feet, with pointed steel poles in between. The road had long ago been paved with brick, and Summer Place had become the year-round residence of Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr.
After the death of first their father and six months later their mother, Mitchell Graham Whittaker, the older brother, had taken over the brownstone in Manhattan and lived there unmarried (but, it was reliably rumored, seldom without female companionship) until his death.
And the house on Q Street had gone to James Graham Whittaker, the baby brother, who had been killed with Pershing in France four months before his wife delivered their only child. As Chesley 14aywood Whittaker often thought, young Jim Whittaker became the only chance the family had to perpetuate its name and fortune. sty and his wife-to their deep regret-were childless.
Che For James Is wife, a Martindale girl from Scarsdale, had remarried a couple of years after his death; but she had been extraordinarily kind to Chesty and Mitch about the boy, who had been christened James Mitchell Chesley Whittaker at Saint Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue with his uncles and Barbara as his godparents. She had shared the boy with them more than they had any right to expect she would.
Her second husband, a lawyer on Wall Street, was a Yalie by way of Phillips Exeter. Little Jimmy had followed the Whittakers through St. Mark’s and Harvard. Every New Year’s, they had sort of a delayed Christmas for him at Summer Place, and Jimmy’s mother and her husband and their children always gave them the boy for a in onth in the summer.
It had been planned that when Little Jimmy graduated, they would take him into the firm, but he had instead elected to go into the Army Air Corps and learn to fly. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. Let him sow a few wild oats before he settled down. But now that Roosevelt had extended his service for a year and he had been sent to the Philippines, it obviously hadn’t been such a good idea.
Chesty Whittaker missed Jimmy very much, and so did Barbara, and Chesty was also worried about what the war that seemed Imminent would mean for Jimmy. Today he would get some answers. Or thought he would. He was going first to a Giants game, and then to Washington, with his lawyer friend Bill Donovan. Donovan was already doing something very hush-hush for Roosevelt-so hush-hush that the normally cheerful and expansive Donovan changed the subject every time Chesty tried to pry out of him what it was he was doing for Franklin, though it was obviously related to what he and Commander Ian Fleming had been cooking UP together last summer.
Donovan, nevertheless, had better access to what the future had in store for him and for Jimmy than Chesty himself did, and Chesty knew that except for those matters covered by secrecy, Donovan would give him straighter answers than he had got from Franklill the night he and Jimmy ate with him at the White House. When he’d asked him for straight answers, Franklin just grinned his enigmatic grin. “If you want to get in the game, Chesty,” he said, “you’re going to have to join the team.”
Chesty Whittaker was damned if short of war he would join Roosevelt’s “team.” If the man wasn’t a socialist, he was the next thing to it.