Belle Cora: A Novel (7 page)

My detection of Sally’s embezzlements brought me extra attention a few days later, at Thanksgiving, a feast our family celebrated the second week of December. It was our one big holiday of the season, for in those days people of New England stock still nourished a Puritan disdain for Christmas. Since Christmas was already an elaborate affair in New York, the signs of it all around us helped to make us feel we were a colony of sober New Englanders, here on a mission in a city whose leading families cared only for money, pleasure, and appearances.

Soon after we arrived at the big house on Bond Street, with the usual round of cheerful but stiff greetings, my grandfather announced to the company that he would have a word alone with Arabella in his study. He took my hand and led me to a small, cluttered room where a window with
many light-warping panes looked out on trees whose branches drooped with snow, and a yard dotted with the footprints of dogs. He took a stack of papers off a chair so that I could climb onto it, flipped back the tail of his coat, and sat down. He praised me for discovering Sally’s trickery. “I could wish that my chief clerk had as sharp an eye as yours.”

He asked me if I was as attentive to my Sunday-school lessons as I was to the misdeeds of the help, and I said I hoped so, and he tested me with a series of questions of advancing difficulty. I told him who made the world; I identified Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Lot, Joseph in Egypt, Moses, Mary, Mary’s Joseph, Paul, and Peter. He nodded his approval as I affirmed—without the least idea of the implications of what I was saying—that because of Adam’s disobedience we were all wicked sinners, and that every evil thought we had was our own, and every good thought we had was put there expressly by the Lord. We all deserved to go to hell, but some of us would be redeemed anyway. He asked me what I had to do to be saved, and I said, “To love God.”

He started to speak, and stopped himself.

I added, “And to have the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

This pleased him. “And who can have the gift of the Holy Spirit?”

“Anyone, if they sincerely repent.” A lady in the sewing circle, now deceased, had laid great stress on this, and evidently it was the right thing to say. My grandfather reached forward awkwardly and patted me on the shoulder. He did not have an easy way with children. All the same, I knew he liked me. I liked him back, without ever once wondering how people could like each other if, thanks to Adam’s sin, they were totally depraved and there was no good in them.

“Tell Louise I said to give you an extra helping of pudding,” he said at last.

I would have gotten the extra helping anyway, but I thanked him. “Grandfather?”

“Yes, child.”

“Grandfather, what does ‘go on the town’ mean?”

He blinked. “Who used these words?”

“Sally.”

“I see.”

“She said she was going to buy a nasty dress and go on the town.”

“I see. Well, I suppose she meant that she would find other work,” he said brightly.

My grandfather was a busy reformer. Beyond such projects as the printing of religious tracts, the building of workhouses, and campaigns to suppress drunkenness and Sabbath breaking and to abolish slavery, he was a sponsor of the Magdalene Society and other efforts to promote the reclamation of fallen women. He knew very well that “going on the town” was what girls of the laboring class said they were doing when they went out to prostitute themselves in the street.

He rose and opened the door, and I followed him back to the second-floor dining room for Thanksgiving dinner, where I ate until my stomach hurt.

The feast was marred by two incidents.

First, Lewis had used the time I spent talking to my grandfather to wander into forbidden parts of the house and was found playing with my grandmother’s collection of fine lace. My grandmother had no patience for small boys. She let my mother feel her frosty displeasure for the rest of the afternoon.

Second, as is traditional at Thanksgiving, someone’s feelings were hurt. That person was my father. I know because at our house that night I heard my mother consoling him in their bedroom, a wall away from the room I shared with Lewis and Frank. There was weeping, which I realized with a shock was his, and a groan of anguish, and this mysterious shout: “… thirty-seven!” Years later, I realized it was his age. I held my breath, and they went on talking, but I couldn’t understand any more of it.

The next day, when he was having his coffee alone at the table, and reading letters that he had taken in a messy bundle out of a leather bag, I asked if I might sit with him. Yes, if I was quiet, he said. I watched him read and turn the pages and sip his coffee, and scratch his cheek, and write notes. He looked at me. I asked him if his work was very hard. I said that he must be very smart to do such work, and he smiled, saying, “Arabella, you promised not to make noise,” and sent me away. My father usually showed us a cheerful face, but I know from my mother’s diary that he was given to attacks of what in those days we called “the melancholy.”

III

A FEW DAYS LATER, IT BECAME SO COLD THAT
, to save wood, we moved our bedding downstairs and slept near the big sitting-room fireplace—my mother, my father, my brothers, Christina (the girl who replaced Sally), and me. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and sat on stools and chairs, faces ruddy in the firelight, and Lewis begged my father: “Tell us about the Turk.”

This was a frequent request, arising out of Lewis’s refusal to eat pork and my father calling him a “little Mussulman” and asking him how many wives he meant to have when he grew up. Lewis had responded with questions of his own, and in time my father’s answers developed into an absurd lecture which operated powerfully on my little brother’s mind. In the house and on the street, Lewis went about holding a stick for sword fighting, now pretending to be the Turk and now a doughty American sailor, the Turk’s enemy, whom my father had added to the lecture in the second or third telling.

“The Turk hates houses,” said my father solemnly. “He lives in a tent. He always wears a hat, even in church. He doesn’t eat pork, but turkey and Turkish Delight. He has so many wives he can’t remember all of their names.”

“He boils you in oil!” interjected Lewis, jumping to his feet. Boiling in oil was his favorite part; often he brought it up prematurely, afraid my father would forget to include it.

“Don’t interrupt, Lewis,” my mother admonished him.

He sat, but as he did he confided to Frank, “He tried to make the sailor a Mussulman!”

“Let Papa tell it,” said Frank, who liked this nonsense almost as much as Lewis did. My father had originally thrown in the sailor for Frank’s benefit. The others in the room were Edward, mainly intent on staying warm; Robert, who lay with his back to the fire, the better to get its light onto the tiny print in
The Penny Magazine;
and Christina, whose English was limited; and my mother. They all looked up, amused by Lewis’s reactions.

“That is in fact what happened to a sailor of my acquaintance who was
captured by the Turk,” continued my father. “The Turk said, ‘Be a Mussulman or be boiled.’ But this sailor had personally been handed a Bible by your grandfather—I was there; we were walking on the docks, handing out improving tracts and Bibles to drunken sailors and watching the change start to come over them by the very touch of it in their fingers—a wonderful sight to behold—and he had read his Bible and become a strong, stouthearted Christian. ‘Boil me in oil?’ he said. ‘I double-dare you to.’ ‘I’ll do it,’ said the Turk. ‘I don’t believe you,’ said the sailor. ‘You asked for it,’ said the Turk, and threw him into the bubbling pot! Oh, the poor sailor! He found it very uncomfortable. Luckily, his skin had been toughened by years of salt spray washing over him as he hauled the ropes on the deck of a two-hundred-ton three-masted brig, and he stood up to boiling in oil remarkably well, though he told me he would hate to go through it again, and I have no reason to doubt him. He was a very honest sailor, at least after he had gotten his Bible.”

“I won’t let the Turk boil me at all!” declared Lewis. “I’ll take his sword away and cut his head off! I’ll shoot him between the eyes!” My mother, who hated the Turk story both for itself—for its violence—as well as for its effects on Lewis, said he should not talk of cutting off heads and shooting, and I told him that if he kept interrupting, Papa would not be able to finish, and he managed to keep silent after that.

Later that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard the wind rattling the windows and doors like a prowler trying to find one left unlocked. I heard my mother cough and sit up to spit in a pot placed nearby for this purpose. In the morning, she would look at the sputum. Now she lay in the dark, wondering what color it was, and so did I.

That night, I dreamed that Dr. Boyle had come to see her. He opened up her chest as if he were opening the doors of an armoire, and he showed us the rot inside: old bottles, bits of newsprint, creeping centipedes molded to the humps and valleys of limp brown cabbage leaves. He took out her lungs and held them up to light suddenly streaming through the window. “As I thought: phthisis in every tissue. Only the fruit of a tree in Cyprus can save her; but, inconveniently, the Turk has it. Somehow your family must obtain it from the Turk, who hates us; to get it you may have to kill him.”

Lewis leapt to his feet. “I will shoot the Turk, Mama. Belle will help
me to do it.” She looked at him as though very sad that he should still be talking of shooting when she had told him not to, and I tried to explain that he meant merely that he would do whatever was necessary and I would help him. I tried to speak. No sound came out.

When I opened my eyes, only a few hours after I had shut them, I saw my father, Robert, Edward, and Frank all standing in the firelight, dressed for the cold in coats, scarves, and hats. It was still dark. I heard bells clanging. One of my grandfather’s clerks, a young man whose hands and face shook from the cold, crouched close to the fire while giving a grim report to my father, who asked him questions. At first I did not understand, but gradually I learned that there was a fire, a big one, spreading quickly (“eating up blocks,” the clerk said), near my grandfather’s store. I was still muzzy-headed from sleep, and for a few moments I thought I could cheer everyone with the good news that my mother could be cured, until the urgency of my father’s voice woke me fully.

“Robert, Edward, you will come with us,” said my father, in a strong voice, but in a strangely pensive tone, as if it were more of a prediction than a command.

Frank said, “May I go, too, please?”

My father, after a hesitation, said yes, a decision he came to regret.

“What’s happening?” asked Lewis, just woken, blinking. “What is it?”

“There’s a fire on the docks,” I told him, happy to have something to do—help control Lewis—and wanting to show that, though I was only seven myself, I understood what was happening and what was important. “Papa will empty the warehouse in case it catches fire. He’s taking Robert and Edward and Frank.”

“I’ll go, too.” Lewis wriggled out of Christina’s grasp. “Papa, please, may I go to the fire?”

“You can go to the
next
fire,” my father promised.

“I want to see
this
fire! Let me see
this
fire!”

As they got ready to leave, he kept on begging and complaining, saying he never got to go anywhere and he wouldn’t be a burden. I had to hold onto him tightly until they had gone. Then I took him to the top floor of the house to look out the east-facing dormer windows; we saw no flames, only a great swath of darkness where smoke blocked out the stars. But we heard the fire’s distant roar, and the bells of the fire engines,
and later, as the drift to sleep disheveled my thoughts, I imagined that the bells were a magical attempt to break up the fire by tearing through its voice.

The
Herald
reported later that the fire had broken out at nine o’clock at night in the store of Comstock & Andrews, in Merchant Street, a narrow crooked lane of dry-goods merchants and auctioneers in the rear of the Merchants’ Exchange. Someone had forgotten to close a gas cock when the store was shut; gas had filled the room, and when the gas reached some lit coals in the grate, it exploded. Within twenty minutes, conflagration was spreading to other blocks. Fire brigades from all over the city—later, from other cities—fought the blaze in weather so cold that the water in the hydrants had frozen. Horses dragged the engines to the East River; firemen chopped holes in the ice, linked hoses and pumps to carry the water from the river to the fire, and poured brandy into the hoses to keep the water liquid; when they pointed the hoses at the flames, the wind blew the water back in their faces as pieces of ice.