Belle Cora: A Novel (13 page)

MY UNCLE WROTE TO MY GRANDFATHER
, saying he preferred for us to come after the grain harvests. Thus we lingered at the house on Bond Street for months longer, interpreting the delay as a reprieve, and hoping that my grandparents would change their minds. In September, Robert and Edward left for boarding school. On the morning of their departure, Robert made three trips to my room in order to bring me, twelve books at a time, his thirty-six volumes of Buffon’s
Natural History
. They were mine now. “If you can manage to read them, you will be a savant where you are going,” he said, for Robert was a snob, and, despite a serious desire to reconcile me to my fate, he simply could not refrain from making disparaging remarks about the fools he expected me to meet at my destination.

I knew the books were dear to him, and I embraced him for a long time, pressing my face against his coat. I noticed that he had grown faster than I had in the last year, and I wondered what our relative heights would be the next time we met.

When Edward heard that Robert had given me his books, he was annoyed. “Are we supposed to give presents?” he demanded. “You should have told me.” He rummaged in his bags and came out with a pincushion that my mother had made with her own hands and given to him on her deathbed.

“Mother gave you that,” I told him, really shocked. “You can’t give that to me. You can’t give that to anyone. You have to keep that forever.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and gave the pincushion to Lewis instead. My parting with Edward was a good deal less sentimental than my parting with Robert. We all embraced again outside the carriage, driven by one of my grandfather’s servants, and we watched them go.

Finally, the day came, early October, chilly but clear. Servants loaded our trunks, carpetbags, and portmanteaus in the back of a hack; and—hoisting Lewis up in the air by way of greeting—there was my grandfather’s clerk Horace, charged with bringing us all the way to our destination in the Finger Lakes. Fool, I thought without any judgment when I saw him, because my brother Robert had twice referred to our trip here in the wagon and what a chattering fool the driver, Horace, had been. But I was glad to see him. He was familiar: indeed, Horace had a way of seeming like an old acquaintance a quarter of an hour after you met him.

As we rolled downtown, he told us that it would be easy getting help carrying our baggage onto the steamboat, because times were hard—and, in fact, when we reached the docks we were approached by men eager for day labor, some of them in fine clothes recently soiled.

On the steamboat, we pushed our way to the rail with the other passengers, men in straw hats, stovepipe hats, and caps; women whose true shapes were a mystery housed somewhere within bulky dresses with wide shoulders and leg-of-mutton sleeves and many petticoats. All of us felt the sudden jar—some staggered and grabbed the rail—and the paddle wheel churned foam, and with what tumult in my heart I cannot express, we left the island on which I had spent my whole life. As we moved upriver, the piers seemed to turn like spokes of a wagon wheel. The shores behind us began to fold upon themselves. The shores ahead began to open. The buildings nearest the shore shrank. The top story of a tall edifice rose behind them, and though I knew the North River was on the west side of the island and Pearl Street was on the east, I asked Horace if it might be my grandfather’s warehouse.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Do you see it, Lewis?”

“Which one?” Lewis inquired, squinting.

“Why, of course, the tallest. Is it still the tallest, Horace?”

I was looking at the building when Horace answered, “Yes,” and though his voice was almost inaudible in the hubbub, it sounded strange to me. When I turned back to look at him, he was already looking at me, with a sober expression that was quite unlike him.

Later that day, I overheard passengers talking about a young woman named Victoria who a few months earlier had become the queen of
England. In all the years since that day, every time Queen Victoria has been mentioned, my mind has flickered back, however briefly, to that moment. People were friendly. Whenever they learned we were orphans, they clucked and knit their brows, and when Horace told them where we were going, they promised us that we would love it there. Men put Lewis on their shoulders and pointed out the sights on the river and the shore.

There was a merchant who, when he was told about our journey, said that he was taking almost the same route, except he was going farther, to Ohio. There would be another canal, and then Cincinnati. He was in a hurry. It would take six days.

This made me think, and a little later, as the boat was preparing to stop at West Point, I asked Horace if my father had died in Cincinnati or in some town on the way.

“In Cincinnati,” answered Horace firmly.

“Are you sure, Horace? I don’t see how that can be, if it takes six days to get from New York to Cincinnati. He wasn’t gone that long. He was gone only two days when we heard that he had died.”

“I see.” He gripped my hand. “Yes, I see what you mean. But, you see, your father’s business was more urgent than the business of that man, and he went by fast coach.”

But when the boat had docked and we were on the pier, he said that he was not absolutely sure that my father had reached Cincinnati. It might have been on the way.

He had to tell me that, because once I started doing arithmetic I would discover that it takes three days for a fast coach to reach Cincinnati from New York. And even if in 1837 there had been rails linking the two cities, enabling the merchant to travel at today’s superhuman speeds, and my father had died promptly on reaching his destination, there was no telegraph or telephone to send a report. A human being or a letter would have had to bring the news back to New York. It was simply impossible for my father to have died in Cincinnati, but I had been told a dozen times that he had, by Mrs. Fitch, by my grandfather, my grandmother, and Horace.

From this point on, I knew that I had been lied to. I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. They were all good people, these liars. I knew that they were trying to protect me, and that was frightening, because
they had failed. I was unprotected from the dangerous truth, whatever it was. I wished they had lied more skillfully.

IN ALBANY, BY PREARRANGEMENT
, we spent Saturday and Sunday in the house of a portly clergyman and his homely family. On Monday we started out again and had our first encounter with canal travel. I remember coming to feel that I had never known anything else but this: the laborer in muddy trousers leading a pair of horses on the shore, the long ropes sagging and tightening, the strip of brown water that ambled through the country with a strange intimacy, only the towpath separating us from a farmer’s field or the center of a big town. I had become a pair of eyes, upon which God had imposed the duty to inventory Creation: this cow, this fence, these blackened stumps, this forest, this miserable log hut, this sallow woman in rags who abruptly locked eyes with me.

Horace, who had grown up on a farm, often told us how much he had liked it, and how much we would like it. He made bad jokes, some of which Lewis did not understand, and Lewis laughed anyway. Lewis pestered Horace with questions: about mountains and waterfalls, the family who apparently lived—dirty children, dog, dangling laundry, and all—on a barge coming the other way, the names of towns, the purposes of various tools, the special uses of the wood from the various trees we passed. Whenever I saw Lewis looking thoughtful, I knew he was trying to come up with a question for Horace.

In Rochester, we slept in a cheap inn, and when we woke, our legs were covered with red spots. Horace bought a horse and painted wagon and we set off south. With each mile the scenery became ruder, with more unpainted houses, crooked fences, and underfed livestock. Roads of logs shook the wagon. Roads of mud were full of sky-reflecting puddles. Horace made us walk ahead of the wagon, testing the ground with a stick. We ate at farmers’ houses. We slept in the wagon. In the morning, we couldn’t find Lewis. We yelled his name into the forest. Only the wind and the birds answered. Then a voice above us said, “Here I am!” His arms and legs encircled a silvery-barked branch of an old beech tree that had been shedding yellow leaves onto the road and the wagon all night. He was near the top of it. “Look at me, Horace.”

“Well, well, look at Lewis.” Horace clapped his hands.

“Lewis, you promised not to scare me,” I reminded him.

“Watch this, Horace,” cried Lewis.

“No, it’s too high!” I shouted.

“You’d better come down slowly, Lewis,” said Horace.

He climbed lower, then jumped, and the only reason he didn’t make a hole in the wagon’s flimsy roof was that he slid off it headfirst. He might have broken his neck if Horace hadn’t caught him.

I didn’t let myself care about Horace. Horace was temporary. I should think ahead, to my aunt and uncle. I tried to picture them. All I could see was our parents, not dead after all but hiding, living a new life as a farmer and his wife in upstate New York.

IX

THE TOWN OF LIVY BORE THE NAME
of a Roman historian: so my brother Robert had said when we were discussing this trip, snobbishly adding “a fact of which I’ll wager most of the villagers are innocent.” It had grown up around a stream, which provided power to a sawmill, a gristmill, and a cider mill but was broken by falls that made it useless for transportation. There were several two-story clapboard houses for the local grandees, and a number of one-story and one-and-a-half-story houses. There was a wooden bridge; a livery stable; a general store; a tavern; churches for Presbyterians, Methodists, and Free Will Baptists; and a one-room schoolhouse.

On the day the painted wagon bounced over the deeply rutted road into town, I noticed only how bare it was. Little in the way of fences or grass distinguished the yards from the nameless dirt streets. Balding cows and scrawny, big-headed razorback hogs roamed them both in perfect freedom.

Horace tipped his hat to some odorous checkers-players—one missing two fingers on his right hand, another toothless, face collapsed like a decaying jack-o’-lantern—who were sitting on crates on the front porch
of the general store where we stopped to ask directions. As we entered the store, the stink of whiskey breath and flatulence gave way to spices, leather, tallow, and turpentine. Ahead of us, a man and a boy brought two bushels of oak barrel staves to the jowly storekeeper, who counted them, inspected them, and discarded several of them as unusable. The man addressed the storekeeper as “Colonel.” The storekeeper called the man Jake and the boy Jeptha. We witnessed a disagreement between Jake and the colonel, who smiled a lot, patted Jake on the back, and pointed out some figures in a ledger. Jake, who did not seem to like having six of the barrel staves refused—or to like being patted on the back, either—accepted the storekeeper’s judgment with an almost imperceptible nod of his head. The colonel wrote in the ledger and fetched a sack of flour and a tin of patent medicine from the shelves.

The boy, Jeptha, was handsome, with black hair that looked as if it had been cut with the help of a bowl, and quick, alert blue eyes. I supposed him to be about a year older than I was. His shirt was a butternut color. His homespun woolen trousers had rolled cuffs and were held up with suspenders, all worn and soiled. In his right hand he carried a broad-brimmed straw hat. When his father’s bargain with the storekeeper had been concluded, he put the hat on his head so as to leave his hands free and took a handful of broken crackers from a barrel, while Jake went to another barrel, from which a drinking cup hung on a string. Jeptha, after a nervous glance at the colonel, reached out and touched Jake’s elbow. “Pa.” Jake tried to box Jeptha’s ears. Jeptha skipped out of reach with a calm skill that spoke of long practice, and when he had reached a place of safety, he turned around and watched his father. Putting down the sack, Jake spat a slimy wad of chewing tobacco into his hand, twisted the spigot cock, filled the cup, drank, refilled the cup, and took another. His face ruddier than it had been a moment before, he shoved the tobacco back in his mouth and wiped his hand on his pants.