Belle Cora: A Novel (93 page)

“If he’s sharp as a tack and he wants to go to the Pearson Academy, and I’m willing to pay for it, why won’t you let him go?”

“Weren’t you listening? It’s not me. It’s Susannah. She won’t part with him. I take the blame for her.”

I surmised that Anne had a weakness for her only daughter, and was afraid to make her angry.

We worked a little more quietly, and I asked, “Does Susannah know about me?”

After a few seconds she said, “Yes.”

Another pause. “Well, I could use that, couldn’t I? I could threaten to tell him. You couldn’t, but I could.”

“I see what you mean,” she said after a while, with a contemplative expression that, in her, stood for disapproval. “No, you can’t use that.”

“It would be a bluff,” I assured her. “I would never tell.”

Anne shook her head.

We talked over other arguments that might be used to persuade Susannah, but it seemed clear enough that they had all been made already and had not moved her.

At last, when the hired girl was lighting lamps, which made it seem
suddenly darker outside, Frank came up the walk and I went out to greet him. He had his father’s dark eyes, long lashes, and wavy black hair. He reminded me of Charley, most of all, in his mature, self-possessed expression, which was all the more striking because he was quite small for his age. I could find nothing of myself in his face or form.

The son of a parlor-house madam and a man hanged for murder, he strolled toward the house with his hands in his trouser pockets. He saw me, and for a moment I did not know whether I was going to run to embrace him or run away and hide, I so longed for his touch and feared his judgment. His brow knit. “Godmother?” he asked—he knew me from my pictures! I nodded. He smiled, which made me very happy, and I embraced him with less emotion than I felt and forced myself to release him long before I was ready. He returned my embrace politely, as one would expect from a boy his age who did not know that he was holding his mother for the first time since he was an infant.

I said lamely, “It’s so good to see you after all these years,” thinking, as I had often on the way here, that very few of the methods of ingratiating myself to grown men would be effective on a boy.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he answered mechanically. “You’re just like your pictures. I work at the hostler’s in Livy.” I opened my mouth to say that that was fascinating and I wanted to hear so much more about it, but he added, “I wash up after work there, but Anne makes me wash up again here. So—I’d better do it.”

“By all means,” I said, hurting. “I’ll see you in a little while. We’ll have lots of time to talk. I’ve brought you presents.”

We had supper, usually a simple meal, on the best tablecloth and the best plates, and along with Daniel and Susannah. The hired girl spoon-fed Melanchthon. A couple of times he contributed to the conversation, words that the others seemed to understand, though I could not.

I was overdressed for any possible occasion on this farm—I had forgotten, I had miscalculated—and a few minutes of awed conversation were devoted to my clothes. I noticed that Susannah could not utter a word without bringing a look of disgust to Frank’s face, and that she feared and despised me—Susannah, whose flaxen hair I had combed on a hundred different days when her father’s house was my refuge from Aunt Agatha and Cousin Agnes. Now she was very stout, stouter than Anne,
who was twenty years older. Her flaccid white arms shook like jelly, her face was as round as a pancake, and some minor ailment made her skin look red and bruised. She didn’t try to hide her feelings. She must have been dreading my return for years.

After Frank went upstairs, and Daniel wheeled Melanchthon back to the porch, we drank cider and looked at the stars until I jerked my head toward a lit window behind us on the second floor. “Is that Frank’s room?”

“That’s right,” said Anne. “You haven’t seen Daniel and Susannah’s house, have you, Arabella? Let’s walk there.” Susannah, grasping that we were about to talk about Frank, looked angry and scared, but she complied. Daniel took a lamp, and we walked on a hard dirt path through air that was sweet with honeysuckle and apple blossoms. Anne said, “Arabella, we never thanked you for your generous offer regarding the Pearson Academy,” giving me a cue to begin, but I didn’t wish to: I couldn’t see the others’ faces without a conspicuous effort, nor could Susannah see mine, and I planned to use many subtle effects. So I talked inconsequentially until we were in Susannah’s parlor and she had served us homemade sassafras tea and we had praised its flavor and discussed its tonic properties.

I began by saying that whoever had raised Frank had done a wonderful job. “Was it you, Susannah? It looks to me like it was you.” She sullenly regarded her tea, but Anne and Daniel said I was right. “I knew it. Anyone could see what you mean to him.” She looked up with desperate hope. I had her heart in my hands. “It’s you he loves. He loves you the way a boy loves his mother.” I was glad that I had waited until I was where I could see her face, because I had been about to say that his habitual rudeness to her was clearly the rudeness that boys show to their mothers when it is time to cut the apron strings, and I saw from her expression that this would be much too subtle. She needed a very pure reassurance, and only I could give it to her, because I was his actual mother, dying for his love, and surely I wouldn’t say it unless it was true. I dwelled on the topic until she had the certainty of his love within her grasp. Then I handed her Frank’s letter and watched as she read it. “What he doesn’t know is that you’re the only one standing in his way.”

There was more to my argument, there were all the reasons why going
away to school was best for him and that it was what he wanted, and the unspoken fact that he must never know that his mother was a prostitute and his father a gambler. But the heart of it was the threat that if she didn’t let Frank go I’d tell him that she was the one keeping him here. He’d know that in a matter so important to him she had pretended one thing while doing the opposite, and he would never trust her again. After about an hour of this, Susannah, hating me more than ever, agreed to let Frank go; Daniel was holding her and comforting her, but it was plain that he was grateful to me.

It was agreed that I would deliver Frank to the Pearson Academy myself. A few days later, we took the stage out of town.

WE WERE SHY WITH EACH OTHER
. On the stagecoach, our fellow passengers—a corn jobber with a storybook witch’s face, a handsome drummer, and a jowly sawmill owner smelling of peppermint—talked about the war, and asked me about California. Out the windows, the scenery jogged by, tame and orderly, the houses painted, the roads gravel or plank, the bridges covered. I told Frank how different it had looked when I came here the first time, as a girl. He nodded firmly, obviously not the least bit interested. The only thing about this road that mattered was that it was taking him where he wanted to go.

Savoring each moment with my son, I made the journey last longer with two stops overnight in towns, and meals at the most expensive restaurants I could find. Once, at our hotel (where, to respect his privacy, I got him a separate but adjoining room, and he was amazed by my extravagance), he noticed a deck of cards I had used for a game of patience; and he invited me to play gin rummy, which Anne had taught him. Charley had told me to keep Frank away from cards, I remembered. With some misgivings, I shuffled the deck and we began.

“Play well,” he said after a few minutes. “You’ll need to.”

I lost. We played other card games, and backgammon and checkers. I remember how it felt, losing to Frank. There was motherly pride, there were memories of Charley, there was helplessness. Struggle was useless. It wasn’t personal. You were his food. In after years, I would think of these games whenever I heard that some little businessman had discovered that a new zoning ordinance was forcing him to sell his factory, and that
Frank had come to him saying, “If you had sold out to me the first time I asked, you’d have gotten a better price.”

At the Pearson Academy, I spent a few days making things smooth for him, buying him clothes and things for his room, imagining the day when I would tell him everything and he would love me.

LXVI

I RETURNED TO NEW YORK A DAY BEFORE
I was to meet with Jeptha, and asked at my hotel if any messages had been left for me. The clerk gave me a letter, which I tore open where I stood.

After I read the first line of this letter, I skipped right to the meat of it, in the third paragraph. Then, with many anguished gasps, and my hand on the edge of the high desk for support, I read it through from the beginning. “Are you all right, ma’am?” asked the clerk, turning the register around to let a middle-aged couple inscribe their names.

“Yes, thank you.” I was already crossing the lobby with the porter when, as an afterthought, I turned back to the clerk. “Could you …” He raised his chin and eyebrows, ready to serve. “Where is Fort Schuyler?”

“I will find that out for you,” he promised.

The man who had just finished writing in the register put down the pen and said, “It’s north of here. On a place called Throgs Neck.”

And his wife spelled out, “T-H-R-O-G-S.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” said the man. “That’s where they’re putting the troops before they head south,” he told his wife, and they both glanced at me sympathetically.

I went to my room, where I paced the floor with clenched fists, sat down, got up, and slapped the furniture. How could he do this to me, when he knew what I had suffered with Charley, when he claimed to love me more than life? I paced and I cursed, and then I formed a series of increasingly risky plans, each to be undertaken only if the one that preceded it had failed.

I knew it would be at least a few weeks before the regiment headed south, so I wrote first to Jeptha, asking when I might see him.

I went the next morning to the headquarters of the Union Defense Committee, hoping to find Colonel E. D. Baker, or at least Robert. Neither of them was there. The men who were in charge made it evident that at thirty-three I was still adorable and trivial, and they promised to convey my message to Baker. I wrote to him, explaining that an awful mistake had been made. My men could not be soldiers. They were badly needed by me, by me much more than by their country.

When I received Baker’s reply, I saw that it had been an error to include Edward in my request. It made me sound absurd. I sounded like every other woman—every actual woman not invented for a patriotic speech or a recruiting poster—demanding that
her
man be spared to plow her fields and warm her bed.