Anyone who grew up in or near Providence, Rhode Island, knew the old bank building. Its gray stones had held in safety the treasure of piggy banks, the birthday presents from fond uncles, the weekly paychecks and stock dividends of the thrifty working-class New Englanders since rum, slaves, and guns had made the town more than just a farm market. Later, the bank housed the profits from the textile mills of southern New England, from the slate quarries of Pawtucket, and from the fishing fleets of Galilee and Jerusalem, at the mouth of Narragansett Bay.
Everyone knew that the bank was solid. It offered no toasters, electric blankets, or water tumblers to lure prospective savers. It had a reputation: trustworthy, solid, and steady, which brought people to its mahogany counters, where the tellers’ windows resembled the gun ports of the old frigates that had brought the city wealth, to deposit their nickels, dimes, and dollars. No deposit was too small or too large.
Something different brought the wealthy customers: privacy. The bank was the Kitteredge family, and the Kitteredge family was the bank. The Kitteredges had been counting, saving, investing, and hiding the money of the rich from the days when British tax collectors sought the Crown’s share of the lucrative molasses trade to the present era of the slick and merciless IRS computers. The Kitteredges were private people, private in the way that can be found only in New England and the Deep South. For the Kitteredges, a new customer was merely a third-generation saver at the bank. Their steady clientele were those who had hoarded their money during the Revolution until they were sure just how things would turn out. Money from the bank fought the Revolution in the form of uniforms, muskets, and powder, although one Kitteredge, Samuel Joshua, displeased his grandfather by donning one of those uniforms and dying at the head of his platoon on the ramparts of Yorktown. Far more sensible in the old man’s eyes were the Kitteredge-financed privateers who raided British shipping on the high Atlantic, thereby serving their country by crippling British sea power, while at the same time bringing home nice profits to the bank.
The Kitteredges were fortunate-some say provident-in producing the right numbers of male and female offspring. Kitteredge followed Kitteredge in direct line as presidents of the bank, with few enough descendants to avoid destructive squabbling and just enough to keep the business in the family.
The nineteenth century was a golden era for the family and its bank, an age when patrician attitudes went hand in hand with the growth of the republic. The Civil War brought a financial boom, and another son, Joshua Samuel, marched off to help destroy the evil institution of slavery that his forefathers had done so much to establish. Young Joshua did not march back; a grave was chipped out on the frozen slopes of Fredericksburg, where a Rhode Island general had ordered him to his death. (“A foolish charge,” Joshua’s father had grumbled at the memorial service, “like someone from Massachusetts might do”-that state having a reputation for fanaticism akin to Rhode Island’s legacy of unprovoked orneriness.)
In the halcyon years between Appomattox and the sinking of the Lusitania, the bank thrived. The gaslight gave way to the electric light, furnaces took the place of potbellied stoves, but the old stone building itself never changed. (And never would. “A bank isn’t plastic, glass, and steel,” one Kitteredge had thundered during an infamous 1962 board meeting when a foolish member had proposed a “new look.” “A bank is stone, brass, and hardwood. People bring their money here.”)
The Kitteredge lifestyle was as conservative as the building itself. “Keep the business in the office and out of the newspapers” was the honored family motto. No Newport mansions or debutante balls for the Kitteredges. Their large houses were tucked away in Narragansett or in the woods of Lincoln, and, of course, the old family home on College Hill remained occupied and freshly painted. The Kitteredge youths attended Brown (Yale, too progressive; Harvard, too flashy; Princeton, in New Jersey), berthed their sailboats in a small cove in Wickford, married girls from New Hampshire and Vermont, and drank their whiskey in their dens at night.
July 8, 1913, stands out as a significant date in terms of the lives of Neal Carey and Joe Graham. On that day, one William Kitteredge, in roughly the middle of the standard twenty-to-thirty-year apprenticeship as vice president of something, beat the scion of another family rather too easily in their weekly tennis match at the club. This gentleman, whose family maintained reserves of at least two sets of books at the bank, confessed to Bill that the light of his life, his young daughter, had run away with an Italian. This disturbing revelation provoked sympathy in Bill, who thought something should be done-quietly.
That evening, Bill had a word with Jack Quinn, a janitor at the bank, whose son, Jack Junior, was a promising young prizefighter and youth about town. Could young Jack perhaps lend a hand? Jack was delighted and located the couple, had a few friendly words of counsel with the now-less-than-ardent husband, and delivered the girl to Bill at his house in town. Bill, in turn, had a drink with his friend the judge, and the marriage never happened. Bill returned the daughter, received copious thanks, and thought no more about it until he was summoned into the office promptly at seven o’clock Monday morning.
“Hear you’ve been rescuing damsels in distress from the clutches of recent Mediterranean arrivals,” his father said.
“That’s right.”
“Plan to continue this sort of thing?”
“Might.”
“Then you had better get organized.”
Actually, the old man said, it made sense. The world had changed, and could be a more troublesome sort of place than it should. The bank despised a scandal, he said, and more and more of its old customers seemed to be getting in the newspapers these days. “We’re old friends of these families, and moreover, it’s in our interest to keep them safe and happy. Cheaper in the long run to take care of some of these little problems ourselves.”
So Bill got a raise and a budget and orders to put together an agency within the bank to be at the service of old friends whose private problems might not be best ameliorated by the public arm of the law and the grimy hands of the press. The agency never existed on paper, and the door of Room 211 never proclaimed FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY, but that’s what the agency came to be called, and the word passed quickly around the locker rooms and boardrooms of southern New England. The word was that if you needed something done quietly, go visit Bill or drop a word at the bank. That old stone building housed Friends.
Of course, the needs of Friends’ clients changed with the century. Prohibition brought in its wake waves of arrests, which, in turn, brought showers of envelopes cheerfully dropped on enteprising police and judiciary. And a wave of a different sort-the immigrant wave-changed New England forever. But the bank held its ground, and Friends, with both fists and favors, carved out a modus vivendi with other tight-knit ethnic organizations. The Depression winnowed the bank’s customers and forced the bank to burrow deeply into its reserves to survive until Hitler and Tojo filled the shipyard with contracts and workers again, and people remarked over dinner how provident the Kitteredges had been to invest in the arms industry way back in the Thirties.
New England was already on its way to becoming a backwater, however. The textile mills packed up and went south to the cheap labor, and the business talent caught the train to New York City, whose glass and steel monoliths began to buy up more and more New England businesses. Friends’ clients were increasingly finding the worms in the Big Apple, so in 1960, a quiet branch office was opened in Manhattan. Not long after that, Friends hired a foul-mouthed, one-armed, too-clever-by-half private dick named Joe Graham. Not long after that, on one of his early cases, Graham was sitting in a quiet West Side bar when some kid tried to pick his pocket.