Belle Cora: A Novel (60 page)

Jeptha wanted us to be married by his friend and guide, Reverend Charles Danforth of the Wall Street Baptist Church, and we visited the reverend and his desiccated wife, both of whom looked at all times as stiff and astonished as if they were posing for their daguerreotypes. Mrs. Danforth took me aside for a dismal talk about my bedroom duties, which she presented in the light of a martyrdom. She left me with several pamphlets expressive of her views: the one I remember best was called
Marital Chastity
.

From there we walked to the offices of Godwin & Co. to receive congratulations and discuss arrangements. “Well,” said my grandfather,
“well, well,” and shook hands with Jeptha. There was a forced jollity to my grandfather’s manner that I remembered later.

I intended to insist that my grandfather increase Jeptha’s stipend—which I had learned was shockingly parsimonious, less per year than the money that had been spent on the banquets of the California Missionary Committee—but I knew that Jeptha would not approve of the conversation, and I thought I would postpone it till the next day, when we were all to meet at my grandfather’s house and I could buttonhole Solomon Godwin while Jeptha was otherwise engaged. But now my grandfather, with an unconvincing smile to cover the impropriety of his request, said that since Jeptha and I were not married yet, he hoped it would be all right for him to discuss a small family matter with me alone, and took me to a small office.

“Do you have something you wish to tell me?” he asked.

“Yes.” I told him that after proposing to me Jeptha had mentioned the size of the salary he was to get from the California Missionary Committee. “It’s worse than parsimonious—it’s impractical.” For two minutes I spoke, adducing this reason and that one, but with a mounting uneasiness. There was an unfriendliness in my grandfather’s gaze, and I knew something unpleasant was in store. I ended with a hint that if better arrangements were not forthcoming, Jeptha and I might have to stay in New York after all.

All at once, his rheumy old eyes emptied of all sympathy and lingered coldly on mine. “I don’t think it’s very likely that you will do that, Arabella.”

I became very still. I waited.

He continued, “I think you’ll do all you can to get that unfortunate young man to the other side of the continent before your past here catches up with you.”

“Oh,” I said, stung. “Grandfather, think what you will of me, but don’t go on.”

“I try to be a good man. I know I’m just a worm before God, but I have my vanity, and I don’t like being thought a fool, even by a clever young harlot.”

“You’ve been listening to Agnes, a proven liar.”

“My information does not come from Agnes,” he said quietly—the
whole rather brutal conversation that followed was conducted in low voices. “You know I am a member of the Magdalene Society, which keeps close track of all such people as Mrs. Bower and Miss Harriet Knowles. I know which dress shops serve them. It made me unhappy to think that yours was one of them. And after that, the only serious impediment to my discovering everything was my own reluctance to know it. But now I do know, and you are in no position to dictate terms to me.”

I put my head in my hands. He said, “Your life has turned you into an actress.”

Well, that was a very unfair remark; I felt that, and it helped me get through the rest of the ordeal. For years I had been rebuking him in my imagination; I had wished he was alive so I could tell him what he had done to me by sending me away to live with poor relations—Elihu, Agatha, Agnes, Matthew—and then when he had turned out to be alive the circumstances made it impossible to tell him. Now that had changed, and at last I could say it all. There was no question of thinking of hurtful things to say; it was only a question of choosing and organizing. “You
are
a sinner, Grandfather. You should not speak that way. It is weak and cruel.” I could see from his face that he didn’t like this. “How strange,” I said. “You want to cover me with scorn yet keep my good opinion and until today you did. Even after you’d forgotten me utterly, your own blood, banished to live among poor relations, crude, ignorant people—”

“You know very well why we sent you there. It was for your own good.”

I thought that probably he had not expected the conversation to take this particular turn and I had him at a disadvantage. I leaned in close to him, so close that it was itself a gesture of disrespect. “Do you still say that to yourself? That you sent me to upstate New York, where it is colder and wetter than it is here, to keep me from getting consumption? Are you quite sure you weren’t trying to
give me
consumption?”

He shook his head vehemently. “We had physicians’ advice; we weighed those elements; it was thought that country air and farm work counterbalanced them.”

“What of your wife’s preferences?” I cooed. “Her love of peace and quiet and leisure? Her disinclination for having little children about at her age, especially difficult children like Lewis? How much did that weigh? Enough to tip the balance in favor of Livy?” Perhaps he winced—if
he did it was very small. “I begged you,
begged you
to take us back, away from the vicious girl who plotted night and day to destroy me, and the brute who forced himself on me just as soon as he was old enough to be capable of it. Look what happened to me. Look at it whole. Look at me. This is your doing. This is your work.”

Though I had not been shouting, my throat hurt, and I swallowed the last few words. In the end he seemed to be a good deal less upset than I was, and whether he felt more remorse than he showed, or whether he dismissed everything I had said as vain posturing, I still don’t know. He shook his head again. “I only did what was right in my eyes; I regret what happened to you; it does not excuse your actions since then. You see my emotion but you misunderstand it. I mourn. I mourn for what my granddaughter has become.”

“Tell the world, why don’t you.”

We sat with that for a while.

“I should,” he said at last.

“Conceive what it would do. To you, to everyone connected to this family. And, oh, the worthy causes you espouse, they would hardly benefit. Think of it. Newsboys shouting it in the streets. I’ve stain enough on me to dye you all scarlet for generations. Worldly people would be snickering in the next century. I think, when Jeptha and I are rounding Cape Horn, you should do what you can to close up your investigations of unscrupulous dress shops and who owns them.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? Do you imagine you can make me do your bidding as you make others—as you make Arthur Heywood; as you make those benighted girls you lure onto the paths of shame?”

“I’m just advising you, Grandfather, because I love you. I’ll be in California. It won’t affect me as much.” I stood up. “I hope you will reconsider Jeptha’s stipend. He deserves better, and so do I. You want to help fallen women? Begin with me. I should like a chance at a decent life doing God’s work.”

WE WERE MARRIED BY REVEREND DANFORTH
on July 7, 1849, at the Wall Street Baptist Church, on the morning of the very day our ship was to sail. Jocelyn and Monique were in the pews, happy for me. Lewis looked appreciatively at Jocelyn but gave no hint of their prior acquaintance.
My grandfather did not have to disguise the change in his attitude toward me. His habitually formal manners took care of that. From my grandmother’s behavior, I judged that he had not taken her into his confidence.

A few hours later, we were on South Street, staring up at the
Juniper
, a 110-foot, 325-ton square-rigged three-masted whaling barque refitted to carry passengers.

The day was sunny. Passengers on the decks, high above us, were squinting and shielding their eyes with their hands, but down by the piers we walked in crisscrossing shadows of bowsprits, masts and yardarms, pulleys and ropes, pyramids of barrels, high placards announcing the names of the crafts and their destinations, several bound for California. My eyes followed the lines upward to a sailor hooking one thing to another high in the rigging; the sun at his back turned him into an inky silhouette.

Members of the California Missionary Committee acted as our porters. My grandfather put a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “He’s a good man, and loves you, and I believe you love him, so—I wish you good luck. We will never meet again, very likely.”

He flinched when I embraced him, but I held on for a moment, feeling as I did how narrow, old, and frail he really was.

When the passengers were on deck, together with wives and relatives, members of the California Missionary Committee handed out Bibles. Reverend Danforth, with Captain Stormfield’s permission, gave a sermon comparing us to the Pilgrims and commending us to the guidance of my husband—they were lucky to have a man of God on board this ship. Then the captain, a fiftyish fellow with brown teeth and a glass eye, gave a speech that, although not directly contradicting Danforth, made it clear that on the
Juniper
Stormfield was God. Then it was time for friends and relations to go ashore.

I embraced Lewis. At the wedding, he had tried to raise money from me, from my grandfather, from anyone who looked prosperous, for a trip to California. He couldn’t bear the thought of spending another year at the Pearson Academy while other men were taking gold out of California’s rivers. “Stick it out,” I told him now, a moment before he left the
Juniper
. “Go later if you must; and if you go, go by the Horn, not Panama. If you go by land, go by Oregon.”

The wind stirred up white peaks in the East River and pushed our clothes against us. People squinted and gripped their hats. Someone said that if it was this rough here it must be worse on the open sea. Already, thanks to the sail that had been let out, the ship was rocking; everything was rising and falling. The deck’s pressing upward and dropping away, endlessly repeated, was a third involuntary rhythm added to those of breath and heartbeat. It was strong and insistent. There was no arguing with it.

The first mate was shouting at the men to lay this and lay that. And then: “Let go the bow line, let go the stern line, pull away.” We moved up and down in one place while everything else moved away: the men below us, the hulls and masts and rigging of the other ships, the heaps of barrels, the cobblestones, warehouses, signs, red chimneys, and pointed roofs. The lifting and dropping of the deck became more forceful, as if it were a sort of pump pushing away the island of Manhattan. The nearest buildings shrank. The ones behind them rose. The piers seemed to turn like the spokes of a great wheel as the shoreline began to simplify, a wiggly thread gradually pulled straight; the wind blew my hair into my face. Jeptha wrapped his arms around me, and if our story had ended there, it would have had a happy ending.

XLIII