Belle Cora: A Novel (12 page)

IT SEEMED THAT MY GRANDMOTHER HAD DECIDED
to befriend me the best way she knew how, by having me accompany her as she went about her little routines and self-assigned chores. She did not have to cook or clean in any serious way, but she took upon herself the tasks she said could not be entrusted to the help, which were really the ones she simply liked to do.

So, while Christina minded Lewis, we baked and polished the silver and sewed. We made full suits of clothing from fabrics we selected—materials my grandmother possessed in abundance, drawers and drawers full of rich, heavy brocades and broadcloths, damask, jaconet, and fustians. There was a great deal of lace, which she showed me with guilty pride, explaining the astonishing and basically unjustifiable amount of work that had gone into the making of each piece, years of skilled labor concentrated in that one drawer. Collecting these fabrics was her main vice.

Because women in evangelical circles were supposed to shun vain frippery, an indulgence of this sort needed an excuse. My grandmother’s was that she belonged to her church’s Dorcas Society, which made clothes for the poor. (I did not ask whether she put lace and damask into these clothes, and I still don’t know.) Dorcas, said my grandmother, was a Christian woman in olden times who was so good that Peter raised her from the dead.

This got me to thinking, and after a few more minutes of sewing, I asked my grandmother the name of the illness of which my father had died.

She grew still for a moment and answered tersely, “It was fever. Nothing more specific is known.” A little later, she looked up again from her needle and added, “Several others in the hotel had gotten it, and the vapors from—from his person—were thought to be dangerous, and so they hurried to get him in the ground. That is why you did not go to his funeral.”

“Where is he buried?”

“He was buried there.”

We went on sewing in silence. We were in a drawing room on the second floor, at the back of the house. From the window I could see the lawn and garden, and Lewis with Christina and a small white dog. After another minute, I asked, “Will he be brought home?”

“Yes,” she said quickly.

“When?”

“Eventually.”

“Will he be buried beside my mother?”

“Yes.”

I heard Lewis cough, I heard the dog bark. I looked out the window again. A bird left the windowsill with a flutter and a swoop. Farther away, the dog dropped something at Lewis’s feet, and Lewis, with a stick, was poking whatever had been dropped. I asked, “Who was with him when he died?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did any others in the hotel die of the fever?”

“No.”

We kept dipping our needles into the fabric. The bird came back. I heard it cooing. I made more stitches, and asked, “Did the fever spread? Beyond the hotel?”

“I believe it was successfully contained.”

I thought more and sewed more, and finally asked, “Was it in the newspapers?”

“Stop it, I won’t have it,” cried my grandmother. It was so unexpected that for a moment I thought she might be speaking to a bird at the window or a servant in the next room. “Did your mother never speak to you about asking questions?”

I didn’t like to hear anything that could be interpreted as a criticism of my mother. “My mother worked hard to teach me good manners.”

A little more softly, she agreed, “Of course she did. Your mother was a good woman, and you are a well-behaved child. But you are being thoughtless. Remember that your father was my son, and these questions pain me.”

When we went to church, my grandparents wouldn’t let us speak to anyone.

Doctors visited the house to examine us—all of us. We did not know why, and I did not question it, assuming that my grandfather wished
to know the condition of the new members of the household and was wealthy enough to pay doctors just to determine exactly how healthy we were. Dr. Boyle came first. Then there was a Frenchman, who used a stethoscope, a novelty in those days. It came in a felt-lined wooden carrying case and was assembled from pieces, like a clarinet. We were next seen, in turn, by a Thomsonian, a physiobotanist, and a homeopath. The homeopath gave us tiny white pills. Lewis and I both still suffered from a dry cough, which all of the physicians, whatever their system, considered to be highly significant.

We were not told the results of these observations, but a few times I heard them agreeing sagely that Lewis and I each possessed “a tubercular diathesis.” I knew what this meant. It was supposed back then, before Dr. Koch, that there was a consumptive type—refined, sensitive, and attractive. Beauty of a certain kind was a seal of doom.

A few weeks after the last of the doctors, a servant told me to go to my grandfather’s study. When I got there, he smiled at me, but he looked troubled, and I thought that Lewis must have broken something expensive or uttered a sentiment intolerable even in a boy of seven, and my grandmother had asked that I be spoken to about him. Dust motes rose and drifted as my grandfather moved letters and ledgers off a chair for me to sit. He asked how I was feeling. I said very well. “Good,” he said. I asked the same of him, and he replied that he was in good health for a man his age.

Christina wanted me to use my influence to get her a room of her own. She had had her own room in Bowling Green and didn’t see why she should have to sleep with the children in a much larger house, and she had insisted that I bring the subject up with my grandfather the next time I spoke to him. I had felt timid about passing on this request, but now I was glad to have something to say to delay whatever unpleasant subject he was about to broach.

My grandfather told me, “Christina can have Robert and Edward’s room. They are going to a boarding school. I know you’ll miss them, but you must realize that even if your mother and father had lived they would have gone away soon.”

It was a shock. We had all just sworn to stick together. “But,” I said, to show that I was reasonable, “we’ll see them in the summer and on holidays.”

He was still for a moment. “Perhaps,” he said, and I knew it meant no. “If—if you would please, for the moment, refrain from interrupting. Your grandmother and I enjoy your company. We wish you could stay with us. But it would be selfish of us to permit it. I’ve made arrangements to send both you and Lewis to live with your uncle Elihu and your aunt Agatha on their farm near Livy, in western New York State, south of the canal. As you’ll see when you make the trip, the distances are considerable, and the roads near the end are so rugged that travel between there and here is infrequent. It may be a long time before you see Robert and Edward again. But you’ll have Lewis, and a new family closely related to you by blood.”

What had I done wrong? I wanted to plead with him, but he had told me not to interrupt, and I did not want to make him angrier.

He paused. “You’ll want to know why.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

I was on the brink of tears; I’m sure he noticed.

“For your health. I know Dr. Boyle has explained this to you. You and Lewis are both of the consumptive type. One day, if we are not careful, you may fall ill and perish like your poor brother Frank. To you this seems a distant prospect, because now you are well—though we have all noted the dry cough, which we must take seriously because of the wasting disposition you have inherited. The future comes whatever we do, and you and your brother will have the best chance of a long life—indeed, the best chance of living to be grown—if you are taken from the city’s noxious vapors and nervous stimulations.”

The young child in me wanted to weep and beg, to promise that Lewis and I would be good and never do it again, whatever we had done, and make him happy that he had kept us. But a wiser part of my suddenly divided self was sure that childish emotions would be discounted. I must think.

Struggling not to seem argumentative, and yet to show myself the smart girl he had always liked, I insisted that Lewis and I were both unusually healthy children—our energy and strength often drew comment. That was why Lewis was such a handful! The coughs meant nothing. Everybody has a cough now and then. Besides: “My mother stayed here.”

“And she died,” said my grandfather.

“Why did she stay?”

“Because she was a good woman, and her duty was here.”

“But wasn’t there another reason?” I queried, drawing on conversations overheard. “Because travel is harder for women! It’s not natural, it’s very hard for them to leave their loved ones, their dear ones, dear to their hearts. And we’re children, so it’s even harder. We don’t know these people.”

“They’re your close blood relations,” he rebuked me. “You mustn’t speak of them that way.”

“But I don’t know them. They’re just names. I don’t guess Lewis even knows their names. I don’t mean any disrespect; it’s just true. They’re strangers to us. It’s bad for someone with a wasting disposition to have a shock, isn’t it, and wouldn’t it be a shock to be sent away? It would be worse for us. It would
make
us sick. Or at least it might, and in that case why do it?”

I thought I had spoken well, and my grandfather seemed to think so, too, but it was useless. I was being told, not consulted. “Don’t think the considerations you have just advanced have not occurred to us. Of course they have. We’ve discussed them. We’ve worried and fretted and prayed for guidance, and at last we have decided on this course, which is the recommendation of all the physicians who have examined you.”

He reminded me that I must not argue this way with my aunt and uncle. They were country people with old-fashioned ideas.

Robert and Edward were informed at dinner, after Lewis had bolted his food and left the table, his departure accompanied, as always, by a look of relief from my grandmother.

I was dismayed to see how little the news bothered my older brothers. We must stick together, they’d said, sincerely enough, the night before we left our childhood home, but now they were looking forward to beginning their own separate lives. To make me feel better, they extolled the virtues of farm life. The golden grain! The fresh eggs and butter! The clean, healthy air!

It fell to me to tell Lewis. I emphasized the thrills of the journey, the vast distances and differing methods of conveyance: a steamboat up the Hudson, then a packet on the Erie Canal, bad roads, swamps, and mountains, in a virgin land from which the red man had been swept only a generation earlier. We traced the journey on a map. The country was
smaller then, and with only a little exaggeration we could imagine that we were going out west.

AS PREPARATIONS FOR OUR DEPARTURE WERE MADE
, my grandmother and I worked together to make me what she called, to excuse its extravagance, a “Sunday frock.” She based it on pictures in
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, using the most expensive fabrics in her collection and every fancy stitch she knew.

Lewis and I were sent to a dentist, who pulled one of Lewis’s teeth and filled one of mine. My grandfather had made these appointments for us on the recommendation of the famous revival preacher Charles Finney, who had once searched in vain for a dentist when he suffered a toothache in a town thirty miles north of Rochester. Finney had said that the absence of dentists was an obstacle to temperance in the West, for many good people took spirits to dull the pain caused by rotten stumps in their heads.

ONE DAY, WHEN WE WERE SEWING
my “Sunday frock,” my grandmother said that there was a keepsake of my mother that she had been meaning to give me. She left the room, and returned bearing an oval object the size of a pocket watch.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked me.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

It was a miniature, one of the tiny painted images courting couples used to exchange in those days. Once or twice during my earlier childhood, my father had shown it to me. Executed on ivory with almost inhuman patience and precision by techniques now forgotten, it was mounted in a hinged metal casing with a loop on top so that it could be worn as a locket. The cover opened like a door to a vanished day: There, behind glass, was my mother, aglow with health, in a lace cap I had seen her wear in life and a shawl I had never seen her in, holding a soft-looking leather-bound Bible. The details of the room had not been neglected. I recognized pieces of furniture now stored in a shed behind my grandfather’s Bond Street house. On the reverse side, trapped in some hard transparent resin, a lock of my mother’s hair had been worked into a design resembling a shock of wheat.

From the moment it passed into my hands, I thought of it as a magical connection to my mother and I felt that if I lost it I would be cursed.

VIII