Belle Cora: A Novel (62 page)

I stood there, fearing the pain she would inflict on us should one of her letters reach Jeptha, yet certain that her lies (even to myself I called them lies; they were lies
in spirit
) could never destroy our love. Poor Agnes, my poor old enemy, was telling Jeptha about a woman who no longer existed. She could not know how changed I was, she could not imagine the delight we took in each other every day and night aboard that foul, musty, uncomfortable ship. Husband and wife, we had grown into each other, we were inextricably entwined and woven, turning Agnes’s collection of nasty facts into so much biographical trivia—into, at worst, a history of my misfortunes.

MY GRANDFATHER
’
S LETTER READ AS FOLLOWS
:

I decided to open the letter from his mother and father, in case Agnes had reached them with her suspicions or asked them to enclose a letter of hers in the same envelope with theirs. But, fortunately, she had not yet thought of that. The letter wished Jeptha luck in California. It did not congratulate him on our marriage but acknowledged it, saying that he was a smart man, so he must know what he was doing.

WE RETURNED TO THE CUSTOM HOUSE
to find Jeptha arguing with his flock. He proposed to send George Ewell to find us a hotel; the others thought it was a bad idea, since this mission would take the young man past many purveyors of sin. Like one of the Bible’s timorous prophets, Ewell pleaded his inadequacy to the task. Jeptha gripped the drunkard by the shoulders and swore he was ready. I told Ewell that I, too, had faith in him, and added to his instructions various specific demands as to the cleanliness of the rooms and, in particular, the beds. He was to see for himself and not take the proprietor’s word.

A few hours later, still sober and godly, Ewell led us to a hotel. It was sealed off from the street with a high wall, with gardens around the central building, whose walls were climbed by vines, and another garden in a courtyard, and many broadleaf plants in pots, and cross-ventilation. A square, narrow, turning staircase rose up to our room.

Jeptha let me walk before him, as a gentleman should. Our previous couplings aboard the
Juniper
, with only the darkness for privacy, the repertoire limited by the slender berth, had been an experience
sui generis
, reminding me of no others. But now, as I walked before him, with Agnes’s letter fresh in my mind, I thought of all the times that I had mounted stairs with a man behind me, his eyes level with my hindquarters; and I felt as nervous as a virgin, though for the opposite reason. In the room there would be the freedom of a wide bed. I must not seem to know too much. As he prepared to open the door, I smelled his closeness, which I loved, but I remembered the smells of other men. This had always been an anxious moment, the seconds before I was alone with the stranger who was paying for the privilege of taking me to my depths, ransacking the most secret, forbidden chambers of the temple’s holy of holies and, if such was his whim, fouling it, because he could, because he had the price.

Then we were in the room, and I expected to examine it, to see if the bed was clean and firm, but as impatiently as any of my gentlemen in former times, my husband turned me and pulled me toward him. As if someone were flipping a deck made of a hundred face cards, all jowly kings and tumescent knaves, the visages of a hundred men passed before my mind’s eye while he stripped and unwrapped me, layer by layer, kissing each new patch of flesh as it was revealed, to claim it, to make it his. He lifted me. He took me to the bed, my Jeptha, whom I had known
since I was a girl of nine, and his knees drove mine apart, and he bit my lips gently with his teeth, and he smiled down at me teasingly in a way that was at once cruel and compassionate, and what happened then was an exorcism, as, thrust by increasingly urgent thrust, he filled me up until there was simply no room left for anyone else. I felt as thoroughly claimed and possessed by this one man as I could wish. I was convinced that he had performed a magic rite which turned the world right side up again. We lay side by side. He stroked his face with my fingers. Then he rummaged through our bags and took out a jar of preserved plums, and I fed one to him and he fed one to me, and we licked each other’s fingers.

Later, he rebuked me, gently, for opening a letter addressed to him. I told him that I had had a premonition that it might contain bad news and I could not bear to wait. I admitted that my impatience was a great flaw in me. To change the subject, I asked him if his family thought he had married Agnes (his father’s letter had not mentioned my name). He assured me that they knew the facts and apologized for the tone of their letter. “They’ll come around, I hope.” He did not seem to be too sure of this, and added: “Anyway, who knows when we’ll see them again?”

DOWN BY THE SHORE, HALF-NAKED MEN
sold fish out of canoes, and for two cents women who stood under large linen umbrellas would serve you a bowl of hot coffee or a stew of meat and black beans. We walked by heaps of outlandish fruit; green parrots; a small white monkey with a devil’s face; a giant rat in plate armor; stores with striped awnings; work gangs and soldiers; and a priest wearing about twenty pounds of black cloth and a black tricornered hat. This was Rio. We spent two weeks there, enjoying the honeymoon our swift departure from New York City had denied us. We saw cathedrals, forts, mountains, plantations, churches, and gardens, and learned the stories of natives and other travelers.

Every paradise has its serpent, however. Jeptha, chosen by the California Missionary Committee partly because of his strong Free Soil views, was troubled to realize that nearly all of the Negro laborers we saw in Rio were slaves. Each morning, their owners sent them out of doors to get money; when they returned, they must, in effect, pay their masters not to whip them. The rowers, the coffee carriers, the porters, street vendors,
charwomen, maids, and cooks were all slaves; and the prosperity of Brazil rested on the sugar plantations of the interior, where men fresh from Africa were regularly worked to death because it was more economical to import new ones than to keep the old ones alive. Since cheap labor makes low prices, many of our incidental pleasures were implicated in these crimes. But we told each other we could not immediately perfect the world. Happy with the drugged irresponsibility of lovers, we did not feel this injustice keenly, just as we had not minded the bad water aboard the ship.

XLIV

BACK ON THE
JUNIPER
, WE RECEIVED
the thrilling news that two stateroom passengers were languishing in a Rio jail. This meant that, with a little reshuffling and for a fee we were glad to pay, a whole stateroom might be free for Jeptha and me. But before we could rush to take possession of it, we were told that the stateroom had already been given to a woman and her son. She was French, a widow. Her name was Marie Toissante. The boy’s name was Philippe.

Philippe was eight years old, an active, healthy, intelligent child, curious about everything that went on aboard the ship; soon he became the pet of the passengers, who tousled his hair, gave him candies, played card games with him, and let him hold the fishing line. The boy followed anyone who interested him. His favorites were Jeptha and a tall, sandy-haired, round-shouldered fellow named Herbert Owen, who spoke French and was very happy to make himself useful to a handsome woman and her son. After a while, one saw that really Jeptha was the boy’s favorite, and Owen was being used as a translator.

I have not mentioned Herbert Owen until now since we saw little of him in Rio, but from our first weeks aboard the
Juniper
, he was the person whose company we best enjoyed. He was twenty-eight years old—one
of the oldest passengers—from a good old Boston family. About a year earlier, his reading of German philosophers had turned him into an agnostic, which did not stop Jeptha from liking him. In fact, I could not help but notice that Jeptha’s efforts to change Owen’s mind were rather feeble, as if he did not want to spoil him. For Jeptha, Owen was a relief from some of the pious men who treated the pastor as their very own private property. He was gentlemanly and cultivated; he had traveled, had studied the law and practiced it briefly. For Owen, who knew himself to be a dilettante and a tourist, untested by life, indifferent to ideas—his freethinking was just a toy—Jeptha was someone with convictions, an enviable and admirable trait.

Owen agreed to attend Jeptha’s Sunday services on the quarterdeck if in return Jeptha read Thomas Paine’s
The Age of Reason
, famous in our day as a Deist tract. Jeptha read it openly, high in the rigging or on his back on the deck. When people asked him about it, he told them of his bargain with the agnostic, and said that it was never good to suppress a mistaken book: one must read it to refute it. Book burning was for priests, not ministers. The Gospels need not fear a fair fight.

He believed this in the face of powerful countervailing evidence, as I learned one day when he was twenty feet above me on the mast; the book slipped and fluttered down open, like a gunshot bird, and I caught it. I remarked that Owen and his friend the devil would be grateful to me for saving their book, and Jeptha said, “This isn’t Owen’s copy.”

“Oh?”

“Look on the flyleaf,” said Jeptha.

I looked. In the tropic heat I felt a chill: “
Ex Libris:
William Jefferds.”

Climbing down to retrieve the volume, Jeptha informed me: “His name is also on the flyleaf of Voltaire’s complete works, and he had a book by another Frenchman, Volney, who says that all religion is one, and a
Life of Jesus
which tells the Gospel story without miracles, and some reviews of German books which try to prove by Hebrew grammar that God did not write the Scriptures. I saw some of them when I was still in Livy. He said he read them to refute them, but I should wait to read them until I was older.”

I returned
The Age of Reason
.

“How did he refute them?”

“He didn’t,” said Jeptha. “They convinced him.”

That night, we slept on the deck in our clothes, holding each other, lit by the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, cooled by a steady breeze, enjoying an experience common to drunks and children: our bed was in motion, conveying us to dreamland. And Jeptha told me that Jefferds had lost his faith many years before he died. It was in his diary.

“Many years?” I asked. I could hear his heart. “How many?”