Belle Cora: A Novel (96 page)

I had by then received from him exactly 137 letters.

HALF A YEAR HAD GONE BY
—longer than I had thought the war would last—with no fighting for the 71st Pennsylvania. In 1861, no one knew the magnitude of the slaughter awaiting us. Soon, we thought, a decisive battle would settle everything.

Meanwhile, holes were dug and telegraph poles put in them and raised, mile on mile, until the end of the wire was a few days’ ride away from San Francisco. The Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff occurred on October 21, 1861. On the morning of October 24, Colleen was walking along Front Street, with her arms around a wicker basket containing pork loin and some dried peas, when she was approached by a large, portly, bearded man in a dusty Mexican army uniform with gold-fringed epaulettes and a saber. In his left hand he held a bunch of carrots, and with his outstretched right hand he demanded what he called a “tax.” She had met him before, and she had read about him. He was the celebrated Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico; that is, he was a harmlessly insane beggar, recently made famous by a couple of newspaper reporters who devoted a column to his antics now and then. As she was rummaging in her bag, she heard him say, “My poor colonel has given his life to protect me.” Up close, his odor was rank. When she had given him a dime and walked about ten feet from him he called out, “Tell the provincial governors. A day of mourning in every corner of my dominion. Colonel Baker is dead.”

I had by this time made Colleen familiar with that name, and she
hurried off to a bookstore to purchase the
Globe
, the
Herald
, and the
Alta California
, the front pages of which all described the battle, and the inside pages of which contained the lists of the wounded, the missing, and the dead.

When she reached the house, she knocked on my bedroom door. I saw her face and gave a shriek, and then I was silent.

“Bad news,” she said.

I couldn’t look at her. “Go away, I’m not feeling well.” She didn’t move. We regarded each other. I saw the newspapers in her hand. “A battle?” She nodded. “His regiment.” Another delay, another nod. “But you haven’t read the list yet,” I said. “You don’t know for sure yet.” She stood immobile, and I guess it was about the third second with no nod and no shake of the head that the unspoken truth went into me like a sharp sword, from the tip down to the hilt, slowly, unrelenting. “Oh,” I said, “oh,” with my mouth open, and she came to me, and the newspapers fell to the carpet as we wrapped our arms around each other and I wept and moaned, “Oh … oh … oh …” I fell to my knees. I remember nothing more of that day.

WEEKS LATER, I RECEIVED A LETTER
from Edward, telling me that Jeptha had been shot in the battle’s opening minutes and had died immediately; Edward had seen the body, and Jeptha looked very peaceful.

I had not yet found the will to leave my bed, where I lay numbed by whiskey and laudanum day and night. Colleen forced me to eat, though I could not manage very much, and insisted that I walk about the house sometimes for exercise. After about a month of this, Colleen began to ration my whiskey and ignored my commands for more. I felt literally that I couldn’t fend for myself and I was at her mercy. She obeyed me about everything else.

When Edward’s letter arrived, I told Colleen that I wanted to write a letter to Lewis, telling him that I was all right but I needed to be alone. Colleen told me that I had already dictated, signed, and sent this very letter a few days after I had heard the news of Jeptha’s death. Two days after that, she brought me a parcel that had come for Mrs. Frances Dickinson at the post office. It had come from Carson City, a cigar box filled with straw as if to preserve a fine porcelain bowl, but the contents were not
delicate. It was Lewis’s killing stone, his lucky rock. It was wrapped in a note that said, simply, “Your devoted brother.”

Colleen began reading to me. I begged her not to read the newspapers, but I could find peace twenty minutes at a time when she read articles unrelated to the war in the
Atlantic
and in
Harper’s
. She read me
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Little Dorrit; Don Juan;
Agnes’s copy of
Geography of the Spirit World
, by James Victor Andersen; and Buffon’s
Natural History
, which I had acquired secondhand in 1857.

Months went by like this. When, at a certain point each day, I could no longer bear to be read books, she distracted me by talking. She talked about anything that came into her mind. She talked to me about her life in New York and Brooklyn, about a nice boy who had been sweet on her but had gone to Indiana and was married now, and about her adventures here when she went out each day. Sometimes, though she was an intelligent girl, she said silly things, and I knew it was because she was racking her brains to say anything at all; she was doing it to keep me sane.

She talked to me about Ireland; she had been raised on stories of Ireland, by her father and mother, who each emigrated in the first year of the famine and met here one day at a Tammany picnic. Her mother’s younger sisters had died, “after standing in a draft and catching cold, so my poor ignorant mother always told me, and when I was an infant I believed it, and when I got older I didn’t—poor Ma—but just today it came to me that she was right: they were starving, so a chill was enough to finish them off.”

She had been told, of every New York river and lake and meadow, that it was a poor imitation of the real thing in County Clare or County Kildare; from early childhood, she learned to speak the strange names that felt curiously right in her mouth. Her mother on her deathbed had said, “I’ll never go back there now.”

“To think,” said Colleen, “that they could talk that way after all their families had been through. Ireland must be the most beautiful country in the world. Do you agree, ma’am?”

She asked me just to make me talk, I was fairly sure. My silence frightened her. But I didn’t like talking. I didn’t much like anything except my bed.

“What do you think, ma’am?” she asked again.

“Yes, I suppose it’s pretty,” I said listlessly. “I’m sure it’s pretty.”

“I’m going to go there,” said Colleen. “And you know what I think? Maybe we’ll go there together.”

“I doubt that very much,” I said. “I think I’ll sleep now.”

She raised the subject again a few days later: Ireland and its beauty, and the relations she would want to look up there, and that I must go with her—I must go, and take her as my lady’s companion. And when we were done with Ireland, we could go to England, the land of
my
ancestors, and then to France, which was somewhere nearby, wasn’t it? And Italy, to visit the churches and ruins and the famous paintings that we had seen reproduced as tiny monochrome engravings in
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic
. The countries over there were all jammed together. You could walk, once you were on the Continent. But we would go by coach, and by boat down rivers and canals, and stay at fine hotels, because I could afford it, couldn’t I? How pleasant that would be.

She often spoke of this.

“Don’t talk about Ireland anymore, Miss Flynn,” I told her one day.

“Why not, ma’am?”

“Because I don’t wish it, Miss Flynn.”

The next day, she returned to the topic.

“You’re doing it again,” I told her.

“Doing what, ma’am?”

“Talking about your stupid imaginary country. I told you, no more.”

“Oh, but you meant not anymore yesterday.”

“You know very well what I meant.”

“I don’t believe it, ma’am. You couldn’t have, when you know what it means to me. It would be too cruel.”

“I wish I had a dollar for every Irishman that left the minute he was old enough and told me what a fine place it was, and how he was going to return as soon as he had made his pile. But they never do, never. Even when they strike it rich. They never see Ireland again. And you’ll never see it, either. And you’re certainly not going to talk me into taking you there. And, talking of cruel, what could be crueler than to take advantage of my state, the tenderness of my emotions, the weakness of my will, to satisfy your whim to see your relatives in the old country and travel in luxury on my dime through the capitals of Europe. I thought you were
good. I thought you had a good heart. I was obviously mistaken. I wish I’d turned you into a whore while I had the chance. It would have been easy enough. You were considering it. It was only a question of time.”

That silenced her. A few days afterward, she said, “In the market yesterday I got to talking with a woman with a big straw hat, and she was Irish-born. I asked where, and do you know what she said? County Clare! And do you know what she told me?” And so on. I didn’t stop her. There was no more fight in me, and, after all, she was only trying to save my life.

IRELAND IS ALMOST AS PRETTY
as the Irish believe it to be. There are ancient roads of ancient stone; mountains; cottages with thatch roofs, and vine-smothered castles that seem to have grown out of the high cliffs naturally, without human help. There is a River Shannon, a part of which we traveled, and there used to be many, many people named Flynn, relatives of Colleen, but most of them left during the famine. Ireland was less real to me than my own thoughts and memories. I walked through it like a consumptive strolling the well-tended grounds of an expensive sanitarium. Colleen pointed to a destination on the map, took my hand, and said, “Let’s go
there
next,” and I said, “If you wish,” as though I were granting a boon, but really I had no will and needed to be told what to do.

We also went to England, France, and Italy. Sometimes in crowds I saw his face, an imbecilic part of me reasoning that this infinity of persons could reproduce every possible human being. Anything remarkable was primarily a thing that Jeptha would never see.

By late June of 1862, we were staying on the second floor of a Roman palace whose attic was inhabited by the owner, an Italian prince; the rooms needed days of cleaning before an American woman could inhabit them. In the company of a tiny, birdlike Italian in patched trousers who swore to us that he was a count, we visited the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, the Pantheon, and other famous sights. At the Baths of Diocletian, suddenly I covered my face with my hands. The baths had called to mind
The Last Days of Pompeii
, which I had read a couple of lifetimes ago when Jeptha and I were sweethearts in Livy. I had been fascinated by the idea of an ancient city at once destroyed and preserved by a volcano nearly two thousand years ago. I had asked him if we
would be buried under the years, and if people would dig up our broken dishes and dry bones, and he had said,
We’re going to live in heaven forever
. I had asked him if we would be together there.
Always
, he had said.

Colleen started to put her arm around me, but I waved her off. Our scrawny guide was at a loss. Behind me, a strong voice with a New England accent said, “You are thinking about your husband who died. Second husband—no, the first, yet you had a second.” I turned and saw a tall man in a frock coat. “A spiritual man, and yet a soldier.”

I began to sob, telling Colleen, “I’ll die, I swear to you, I’m going to die of this.”

“No,” said the tall Yankee. “Forgive me. You will live many years, and be happy again, and when it is time, you will meet him again in the Summer-Land.” He held out his hand and waited while I wiped my eyes.

Then he introduced himself.

“I am James Victor Andersen.”

“Oh,” said Colleen, astonished, remembering the name from the book.

“I am Mrs. Frances Dickinson,” I told him.

We spoke for fifteen minutes. Then, realizing by natural or supernatural means that I could not bear male company, he made up an excuse and left. I was to meet him again a few years later.

When I did, he said he had foreseen it.

IN
’
84
,
WHEN I HAD GROWN OLD
enough to be confident that no one would ever imagine I had once been Belle Cora, Mr. Andersen and I—by then married—built a house on some land I had retained for that purpose at the summit of what was by then called Nob Hill. Thus we became the neighbors of many wealthy scoundrels, assorted mining, shipping, banking, real-estate, railroad, and manufacturing kings. Several of them had been in San Francisco in the old days, and ought to have remembered me. It lent a frisson to my relatively quiet declining years to nod to these men, and to meet their wives socially, and to wonder if the truth ever crossed their minds. They are all dead now.

To keep the first thirty-three years of my life a secret was strange. I felt at times deeply homesick, like the last survivor of Atlantis yearning to hear her language spoken once again. At least twice a year, unable
to sleep, I would rise from my husband’s bed and go to my own room. Sitting at my writing desk, I would unlock a small brass chest containing Jeptha’s letters from the camp of the 71st Pennsylvania Regiment. Like the strange flower that a man in an H. G. Wells story finds in his pocket, proving that his trip to the distant future was real, these letters proved to me that my past was real. They helped me remember not only Jeptha, never older than he was the last time I saw him, but the woman he had loved and forgiven. I have watched the lines of the writing bleach and grow slender, vanishing slowly before my eyes. The paper has become damp with the oils of my fingers, while the skin of my hands, the hands that exerted a special fascination on my Jeptha, has turned semi-transparent, flecked with irregular dark spots, and traced with prominent blue veins. I have come over the years to require reading glasses, but I don’t need them for these letters. I know them by heart.

LXVIII