Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (12 page)

Often he had; Grissom didn’t say, but Anne began to wonder if Franklin made it so. She pictured Deborah Franklin attempting to put William early to bed, Franklin saying, “Oh, leave him till Grissom comes; he loves to play handkerchief with Grissom.” Even the times that Grissom didn’t see William he always had some kind of report to make: “I inquired. Franklin says he’s well.” The first time Grissom made such a report Anne suspected that he’d made it up to placate Anne, to keep her in her giving mood; she took the report without question, but after she’d settled him she said, “Did I please you well enough, Mr. Grissom?”

He sighed a laugh. “Don’t you know?”

“Very well then. If you’d like me to continue to do so, I ask but one thing in return. Whatever it is you find on your visits to the Franklins, you tell it to me as you find it. I’m no child in need of humoring. Were I to find you hid something from me—” She left the sentence to hang.

Grissom lay in silence so long Anne suspected he was forming up a numbered list of all William’s ills. “I’ve told you naught but the truth of the boy.”

“And of any concerns you might have?”

Grissom stopped again, seeming to understand that was another kind of thing. “I’ve kept no concerns from you.”

“Nor will you?”

Grissom lifted her hand and placed it on his heart. “Nor will I.”

“Well, then.” Anne worked her mouth along the sinews of his neck and from there continued down.

ONCE IN A GREAT
while Anne got to see for herself how William fared, spying him out walking with his father, the boy such a perfect, healthy, handsome little creature that she couldn’t doubt, she mustn’t doubt, he was where he belonged. Once she came upon them too close to be ignored; Franklin picked William up in his arms and began to distract him with a rapid stream of nonsense: “Shall we go to see the ships? Let’s go see the ships. I wonder how many ships we’ll see. How many do you think, William?”

“Two!” William shouted, and Anne was amazed that he knew the number at all until she remembered; William was two now.

Anne discovered other things as she walked about the town; Wilkes was married and lived two doors down from his shop in a house with a hanging shutter, Mr. Black was single and favored the Indian King, Pettengill was widowed, Captain Allgood lived in the well-to-do Fairmount section of town with a pretty wife and twin daughters who often accompanied him in his carriage as he rode about town. If Wilkes or Pettengill or Black happened upon Anne while in company, they grew flustered and looked away; Allgood, on the other hand, looked straight ahead without flinching, perhaps better used to secrets—or bigger ones.

GRISSOM BEGAN TO FORGET
himself in the shop, a little something more each time. One day he leaned over her and laid his palm against her back, another day he touched her wrist, on yet another he used his deeper, richer bed voice to call her. One night after Anne had climbed the stairs to Grissom’s room, after she’d given him his joy and he’d begun to doze, she lingered in the warmth of that luxurious bed longer than she liked to do, the night being one of their first hard frosts. At length Grissom began to stir; Anne made to slip from the bed, but Grissom caught her arm. She turned back willingly enough—he wouldn’t argue the double pay, she knew—but when she went to reach for his part he stayed her hand. He said, “I’ve had my turn.” He took her by the shoulders and pushed her, gently, slowly backward, as if knowing just how fast and hard to go without raising the alarm. He said, “Now keep still.”

Anne kept still, thinking it another part of their old game, but it was nothing like; it was a new one. When Anne discovered it she made to fend him off but by then he’d worked one hand to her nipple and one between her legs, and before she could collect herself it was too late. She was pulling him into her as hard as he was pushing; she felt the racing, racing, racing that she’d created in him so many times, and then she heard a voice—her voice—giving way with an alien sound.

As soon as she could command her limbs again, Anne pushed herself away from Grissom. The wealth of down seemed to suffocate her, to drag her back in and swallow her, but she fought her way to her feet and hurried into her clothes. Grissom called to her when she was already through the door: “Here! Anne!” But she didn’t turn around. She returned to her room and by the time she got there she was trembling. She dove under her bed rug and lay there trying to comprehend what it was that had disturbed her so, but she had no words for the new feeling—only two old ones:
Afraid. Alone
.

17

THINGS WERE CHANGING AT
Eades Alley. The youngest child, Elizabeth, an ailing little thing never as big as her name, died of a malignant sore throat and was put into the ground next to Anne’s father. Next, two of Anne’s brothers went out to work—one as apprentice to the clock maker and the other to muck out the livery in exchange for a cot in the loft. At her first visit in the New Year, Anne was greeted with the news that Mary was to be married to one of the shoemaker’s customers, a man named Ezekiel Lee.

Ezekiel Lee.
It was no more than a name to Anne, which she considered a good thing; if she’d known more of him, it wouldn’t have been the kind of thing she’d want to share with her sister, but it did trouble her that her sister had been uncharacteristically quiet about sharing with Anne. When they were left alone in the kitchen, Anne said, “Come, Mary, what can you tell me of this Lee?”

Mary, all grown, plumper and healthier than Anne had ever seen her, turned to her sister with a strange half smile. “I can tell you he’s a man of enough means to buy himself more than a single pair of shoes.”

Anne smiled back. “So this is his charm, then—his means.”

Mary’s smile spread all the way to her dancing brows. “No.”

What was this new thing in her? It was a thing Anne didn’t know.

BY JUNE MARY TOO
was gone, moved to Ezekiel Lee’s farm at the outskirts of town, nearly into the country. When Anne made her first call, she found a small, plain home in the middle of an insignificant patch of farm—a single outbuilding with a fenced area that contained a lone horse and cow and calf, a dusting of chickens, a disorderly vegetable plot, and a hay meadow beyond; as Anne looked it over she began to think that Mary had meant her new husband could afford
only
two pairs of shoes. But there was a curious soothing air about the place; perhaps it was the regularity of the work going on, or the sense of everything growing, or even more simply, the fact that food was always at hand just outside the door. Anne found herself spending fewer Sundays at Eades Alley, leaving her mother more money in between to keep her till she returned, but with only two young boys left to feed and clothe, there were by now ample resources to go the whole way around.

THINGS HAD CHANGED AT
the upholsterer’s shop too. Anne had kept away from Grissom’s bed for two weeks, turning away from the impatient whisper in the shop, “What’s the trouble, Anne?” But she couldn’t go three weeks without news of the boy. She climbed the stairs determined not to allow Grissom to overwhelm her in that way again, and for some weeks she succeeded, but eventually he managed to slip through, clever with it, sneaking in under cover of his own pleasure until it was too late for her to deny her own. The next time she went to him in utter, cold command, taking away nothing but her coins, but before too many more weeks he’d managed to level her again. And so a new game was born.

MARY GAVE BIRTH TO
her own boy in the same, undecided month of November in which William had been born. Anne went to her sister’s as often as she could, finding her own joy in Mary’s contentment as she sat with her babe secured in her arms. One day as Anne came in after one of her visits, Solomon Grissom said, “You’ve been to your sister’s.”

“How do you know?”

“You come back all peace and roses, that’s how I know.”

Perversely, the remark disturbed Anne. She wanted her own peace and roses, not her sister’s. Indeed, she’d time and again found comfort, if not complete peace, in the fact that three-year-old William was as strong and healthy as a child could be, or so he’d appeared when Anne had last spied him in the Franklin carriage five—no, it would have been six months ago now.

WILLIAM WAS NEARLY FOUR
when Anne read Franklin’s advertisement in the 1734
Gazette
for “a servant that is a scholar and can teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Anne read the word—
children
—plural—and saw in it all the rest of it, all she’d dreamed for William and more. He was to have a tutor, and if he was to have a tutor he was to have a good school, and if he was to have a good school he was to have it all. The paper lay on Grissom’s kitchen table; she’d picked it up and read it as she waited for him to finish dealing with the fire. When he returned to the table, he looked at her and said, “What’s set you alight, girl?”

Anne pointed to the advertisement, unable to say what it was that she read in it beyond the few words, but Grissom read it, dropped a hand on her shoulder, and squeezed. No remark from him could have said more. That night Anne found something inside her opening and expanding until she lay emptied out against him, taking a heretofore unknown comfort in the arms that seemed willing to hold her as long as she lay willing to be held.

ANNE MUST HAVE RELAXED
her attention then, for the days began to leap on without pause. What month was it when she began to make tassels, fringe, braid in Grissom’s shop? What month when she became the one to supervise Maria and the new girl, Rose? What year did Peter’s voice crack and drop? What year did Mary have the second boy and what year the girl? When had Anne stopped fighting Grissom in that big, smothering bed, some nights settling in till dawn in his arms? The unnumbered days and weeks and months and years dripped down over her into one big pool of nameless days until Anne knew every angle of Grissom’s face, every red-gold hair on his body, every look and mood his changeable eyes could take on, but she knew only as much of William as the most distant relation might know.

ANNE KNEW THE YEAR—1736—WHEN
the smallpox came to Philadelphia and galloped through Eades Alley, taking her mother and the two brothers still left at home. Inoculation had been much debated about town but only for the well to do; Anne’s dreams for her mother had come true in part but not in enough parts—not in the parts that would have taken her from that crowded, filthy alley. Anne’s mother and brothers were buried along with the other Eades Alley victims in a common grave far outside of town; Grissom refused to allow Anne leave to attend out of fear of contagion. His fear was so great he talked over inoculation with Franklin and came away convinced that Anne should be inoculated. Grissom, Peter, and Maria had caught the disease in the natural way at the last epidemic, and Rose’s father would not permit her to be inoculated, so Anne was left to consider the procedure alone.

“ ’Tis so new a thing,” she said. “Better to wait till they’ve practiced it some.”

“ ’Tis perhaps new here but the slaves have long known of it,” Grissom countered. “They’ve been inoculating in Africa for years.”

“In Africa!”

Grissom cupped the side of Anne’s face, smoothed a thumb across her as yet unmarred brow. “You mustn’t take the risk of a natural case, Anne. I have the greatest faith in Franklin’s opinion of the process.”

“And I have a greater faith in my own opinion. Tell me of this process, then.”

Grissom laid it out. The stay at a house specially fitted out for the purpose, a special diet begun, a slit in the skin and pus from an infected patient slid into the wound. This most often resulted in a mild form of the disease, Grissom explained, but there were those rare exceptions . . .

Anne held up her hand to stop him. “Have the Franklins been inoculated?”

“Must I always start and end with the Franklins? Very well then—yes, yes, yes, all the Franklins have been inoculated except for Franky. He’s recovering from a dysentery but will get his as soon as he’s well.”

“William too?”

“Did I not say all the Franklins except Franky?”

But there another kind of alarm took hold of Anne. “William was inoculated and I wasn’t told?”

“He came through it fine, Anne. Entirely unharmed.”

“When? When was this done? You’ve told me nothing. You said they were away visiting!”

“I said they were away visiting because I was told by their servant they were away visiting. Franklin only informed me this week of the inoculations.” Grissom looked harder at Anne. “Why, you’re trembling all over! What is this, worry over the child, or rage at me? I’ve concealed nothing from you.”

Anne breathed, willing herself to grow calm, but oh, to have no control over even the simplest news of her child! To be forced to wait on another for this too!

That night Anne let Grissom have every part of her he desired but she kept the whole of herself to herself; she could feel Grissom’s puzzlement and didn’t care—it had been a mistake to let him think he could move her as he willed.

ANNE PACKED HER OWN
bedding and reported to the Slade house on Arch Street, the site selected for the patients’ isolation. She didn’t know a soul there. The daily “diet” she was prescribed of one small piece of meat and a physic each day did not please her; she puked each morning and starved each afternoon. She considered taking her sheets and going home, but the thought of William inspired her to keep on; if so small a boy could survive it, so could she. She watched in some fascination as the cut was made in her skin and the pus slid in, then lay back and waited for whatever was to happen happen.

The fever came first and raged for two days; she continued to puke during the day and sweat during the night, but only a dozen pea-size pustules appeared on her chest and arms. Anne looked to her left and right and saw skin so covered with sores that she counted her luck on the one hand and her belated fear for William on the other.