The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  Ben sounded the knocker. Now he must remember to take off his hat after the door opened, not before—supposing it ever did.

  It opened. In Puritan gray and white, she of the brown face was regarding him with amiable recognition. Ben had started to claw his hat at the first rattle of the latch; he checked that, and was now able to remove it, not gracefully but at least without dropping it on her shoes. All this the slave girl observed with calm, secure in cool gravity, a well-trained servant waiting for him to speak, but there could be no doubt about that flash of welcome. “Mistress Faith Jenks—is she at home?” He spoke so softly he could hardly hear the noise himself.

  “I think so, sir.” Again a sparkle shared, as if she had said aloud: “Of course she is, Ben Cory of Deerfield, but I must make a show of going to find out.” In her actually spoken words Ben heard a puzzling foreign quality: the th was almost a t. “Will you come in, Mr. Cory, the while I inquire?” The foreign stress altered his name to something like Coree. But she did remember him, name and all.

  Clarissa showed him through the entry—he knocked over no furniture—into a parlor dim with heavy drapes at the windows such as Ben had never seen. Mr. Kenny liked his windows casually plain to the world. Clarissa moved to the drapes with the grace of a wild being incapable of clumsiness. She said: “Let’s have more light.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said. She glanced at him quickly, startled maybe by the thanks, then flung the cloth open and lingered briefly, a golden hand raised to the drapery, the round of her cheek lovable in the sun.

  Ben realized he was rudely staring, in a sudden loss of blindness. He automatically damned himself for shameful thoughts—he came here to call respectfully on Faith Jenks!—not to yearn and lust after a slave wench who doubtless owned not even a last name. In his confusion he could no longer look at Clarissa. He heard her murmur some pleasant word about sitting down and making himself at ease. She was gone, and the room cold.

  Clarissa’s hand—now Ben could not even scold himself. He could not escape the sweetness of a golden hand, pink-palmed, shining in sunlight as a part of sunlight.

  Seated and short of breath he tried furtively to clean an over-looked fingernail with a thumbnail, an operation tinged with futility. On the wall a sampler confronted him, not very well made—Kate would have sniffed—asserting: And thine ears shall hear a voice behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. Isaiah, xxx; 21. Ben Cory ventured a modest alteration in the angle of his chair.

  He remembered he did not know the religion of the Jenks family; had stupidly failed to inquire about it of Uncle John. What if Faith were strongly devout?—it was likely. What if she discovered with shock that he had not seen the inside of a meeting-house since coming to Roxbury?… He fretted at the fingernail, borrowing trouble. Could a man dissemble, hiding essential doubts from a woman if he loved her? Shabby bargain: for my pretense, your love. He gave up the fingernail as a lost cause, and begged the moral dilemma to go away a while.

  Slowly, as it may dawn on a wanderer in the forest that he is under examination from a thicket by the feral unconciliating eyes of a Something—bear, catamount, Indian, he doesn’t know, doesn’t exactly wish to know—so it dawned on Ben that he was being studied from the hallway, in perfect silence, by a square lump of girl and a smaller lump of yellowish dog.

  Following her inclinations, the mother of Charity’s dog might have conceived and born a spaniel, but she must have been tempted by the Devil in the shape of a terrier. The snuff-colored result had been amended by years of overeating into a hairy sausage too close to the floor. His silky ears were tolerable spaniel, his eyes all spaniel in foolish sadness, blurred in the iris like some old human eyes. When Ben smiled, a wag disturbed the squirrely tail; he shambled up to analyze the smell of Ben’s feet and pronounce it fair. Charity nodded. “He worships you. I foresaw it plain. Most uncommon for Sultan to worship anyone.”

  Ben studied Sultan in some alarm. He was lying on Ben’s shoes, true, but it looked more like sleep than worship. “Often he growls with menace”—Charity approached, awkward in a shapeless brown frock that did her no good—“the which he was prepared to do when we ambushed you.”

  “I’d’ve gone straight up in the air. A perfect ambush.”

  Charity planted her feet far apart and hid her hands behind her back. “Did you play Inj’an when you was young?”

  “Oh, I did, Mistress Charity, my brother and I. Used to sneak off to the woods where we were forbidden to go, which was wrong of us.”

  “Why?”

  “The woods were dangerous—real Inj’ans.”

  “I’ve seen real ones—not wild, though.” She came nearer, not by walking but by a side-to-side evolution of spread feet, carrying her like a statue on small wheels. “Christian Indians, talked English all piggedy-gulp.”

  “I remember an old Indian at Deerfield, supposed to be a Christian. A Pocumtuck. Wore a cast-off bodice for a breechclout, and was alway—” Ben remembered the failing of Captain Jenks—“was alway a little foolish.”

  “Faith is dressing her hair different, the which you’re obliged to notice or she’ll be in a taking, the which I think is poo.”

  “I’ll be sure to notice it, Mistress Charity.”

  “Be you”—Charity jerked her head; upstairs Ben could hear a muted ripple of women’s voices—“in love with her?”

  Ben evaded. “Charity, I’ve met her but the once.”

  No good. “I thought a person alway knew.”

  “Oh—maybe they do and I’m just foolish.”

  “I guess you are, but very wonderful.”

  Maneuvered thus against a lee shore with the broadside raking him from bow to stern, Ben mumbled: “’Deed I’m not.”

  “Not poo,” said Charity, sinking him.…

  “Do you go often to church, Mistress Charity?”

  “We’re Church of England.”

  “Oh, so was my mother.”

  “Then a’n’t you too?”

  “Well—my father was not a member of the congregation at Deerfield, and my Uncle John is not a churchgoer, nor—nor am I.”

  “Um. Thought everyone was obliged to go.”

  “My Uncle John says it was so, years past. Now, if everyone went there wouldn’t be meeting-houses to hold ’em.… Do you like going?”

  “Mr. Binyon was very wonderful.”

  “He is—no longer with you?”

  Charity shook her head and sighed. “I do treasure his memory. He thundered, as with the voice of many waters.”

  “He—uh—died?”

  “Nay, he went back to England. Later they said his steps went down unto the—that is, he joined—well, somebody. I don’t just know. Mr. Mitching is not wonderful. He whuffles. In fact he is.…”

  “Poo?”

  Charity came quite close, and seemed perilously near to smiling. “You said that—but I’ll never tell. Nay, I do hold in my heart many things that Mr. Binyon—thundered—but mustn’t speak of him, and yet I do sometimes, because everyone says I own the nature of a heedless brat.”

  “I don’t say so.”

  “You are different. Mr. Binyon spoke as with the voice of angels. Somebody said he was forty—he didn’t look so terrible old.… Were all your people killed at Deerfield, Mr. Cory?”

  “My father and mother. My brother escaped, with me. He’s fifteen now, and I’m seventeen. And you?”

  “Thirteen in May. A sad time—nobody will ever listen.”

  “You don’t mean you’re going to be thirteen forever?”

  “Do not be poo.…”

  “He’s a much better student than I, Reuben is.”

  “I can read, by the way.… Was your mother very beautiful?”

 
“Why—yes, Charity, she was. Everyone should be able to read.”

  “I thought so because you are beautiful.”

  “Now, Charity! You ought not—”

  “I know. Alway, everything wrong.”

  “Not that, but—oh, never mind.… What do you like to read?”

  “Not romances. Faith reads those, by the way.”

  “I’ve read but a few.” In Mr. Kenny’s helter-skelter library, Ben had had a glimpse of Aphra Behn and her long-winded imitators; he had rather enjoyed the swashbuckling of Oroonoko. “Our tutor keeps us so hard pressed with the classics we can’t read much else.”

  “Um … Mr. Cory, is it true that swallows spend the winter at the bottom of frozen ponds and streams all naked of any feathers?”

  “Nay, I’ve heard that but don’t believe it. They must go south like so many others and return in the spring.”

  “Um. All the same I drew a picture of some of them under the water all naked of any feathers, and another on the brink—he hath just risen and put his feathers on again.” She gulped and stuck out a blunt jaw. “I draw many pictures, when I ought to be sewing. I like cooking if I can cook what I like.”

  “But sewing is poo?”

  “You too would think so, had you been obliged to do it. Would you wish to behold the picture I made of swallows under the water all naked of any feathers and one on the brink?”

  “Yes, I would, Charity.”

  She whirled like a doll on a revolving pole and marched away. Sultan moaned and followed, a slave to duty with a backward glance of apology.

  Ben heard other footsteps and rose, too soon, and bowed—too soon, so that he was bent in the middle when Faith entered, grave and shining and young, preceded by the bulk of Madam Prudence Jenks, who clearly did not expect a hand to be kissed or shaken but held both pale things curled below the twin billows of her bosom and entered the room thus, rather like an angel looking for breakfast, and allowed Faith to help her into a chair, and loomed in it, rather like an angel disappointed but willing to wait. “’Tis most agreeable of you, Mr. Carey, to call upon us in our simple afflicted seclusion.”

  Uncle John hadn’t mentioned that the Jenks family was secluded, afflicted, or simple. The drowned gaze of Madam Jenks suggested she had risen from a rest of ages under water, for the purpose (imposed on her by others) of viewing Benjamin Cory; if he proved not too detestably in need of correction, she might submerge. Ben mumbled how happy he was to meet her. For all their damp opacity, her prominent eyes were not at all blind.

  Faith’s gold-brown hair lay in soft spirals above her ears; on the coils rested a cap, no such cap as Puritan custom approved but a trifle of frivolous lace—the Mathers would have hated it as one of the stigmata of popery. Her dress today was dead-leaf brown. To Ben it looked uncomplicated and demure, its very plainness encouraging the eye to rejoice in what it held. Surely she could never become gross and overblown, the damask fading to an underwater bleach, dugs swollen to down pillows!

  “How charmingly you’ve done your hair, Mistress Faith!”

  “Oh, la, thank you, sir—I merely toss it together so to have it out of the way.” (And thank you, Charity!) Hands chastely folded, Faith watched him with unmistakable radiance; as Ben dared to meet her eyes she blinked both of them. Ben’s heart floated over shining fields. He must have said the right thing. In fact, as matters looked now he could perfectly well sit down; it might even be expected of him.

  With larger sternness Madam Jenks repeated: “Most kind of you to call, Mr. Carey, seeing we have not been much about since our loss, the which one must suffer with fortitude required of us by the Lord in his infinite mercy, very kind of you.” A parchment contraption appeared magically in her hand; she fanned the pallid orb of her face in a motion grave and hypnotic.

  Faith patted her mother’s arm where folds of baby-creases narrowed to a tiny wrist. “Mama, I think Mr. Cory never met Uncle James.” Faith’s charming double wink instructed Ben not to be even slightly dismayed by sudden Uncle James: she would see him through.

  A red enameled comb projected from Madam Jenks’ tight-bound hair like the comb of a hen, bobbing so unstably that Ben’s anxiety climbed notch after notch. “He did not know James?” Madam Jenks shook her head, but nothing happened. “A pity, seeing he was ever a worthy influence to young and old and would have profited much by knowing him, but God disposes.” Pronouns, Ben noted, counted for no more than ripples, to be brushed aside by the lady under full sail. Solidly abeam of him, cutting his wind and threatening to broach him just when he was trying to claw off to windward, she seemed to be conveying a message: that Benjamin Cory or Carey must have found it extraordinary difficult to maintain the Christian virtues with no assistance from Uncle James.

  “My father’s brother-in-law,” Faith interpreted. “He died last year, Mr. Cory. Mamma thought you might have met him.”

  “Hadn’t the honor, ma’am. I’m sorry to learn of your affliction.”

  “He resteth in the Lord,” said the fat woman, and beamed. “Lived in Cambridge. I trust your grandfather is well?”

  “Yes, ma’am, very well these days.” (What was the use?)

  “I join you, Mr. Carey, in praising, for that mercy, the Dispenser of All Things.” Madam Jenks went on to pronounce the weather changeable; Ben agreed; Faith expressed intelligent neutrality. Small silence spread like a blot of ink.… “I understand you intend going to the college this year, Mr. Carey?”

  “Yes, ma’am, my brother and I.”

  “Preparing for the ministry, I presume?”

  “Neither of us would appear to have the call, Madam Jenks.”

  “Indeed.… Do you enjoy the Boston air?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it, ma’am.”

  “Your pardon, sir?”

  “Nay, I—beg your pardon—I must have misunderstood.”

  “My inquiry was in reference to the Boston air. Do you enjoy it?”

  “Oh, very much.…”

  By some transition which Ben heard but didn’t understand—the instant of kaleidoscopic shift was blurred for him by a gleam of merriment in Faith—Madam Jenks was comparing cats and dogs. “’Tis true a cat is a tidy beast and of value if she be a good mouser, but one can feel no affection for them.”

  “Why,” said Ben, “our big yellow cat—”

  “They are treacherous,” said Madam Jenks. The comb was rising. “Now a dog is a faithful animal instant ever to his master’s needs, for it would appear the Lord hath prepared him for the service of man, and I am trying, Faith, to recall the name of a small dog Mr. Jenks owned, you must remember: I mean the one that was two before Sultan, or was it three?—with a white ear.”

  “You must be thinking of Prince, Mama.”

  “No, my dear, seeing that Prince was the one that fell down the well, and Goodman Jennison spent the better part of a forenoon attempting to rescue the poor brute and had no white ear to be sure.”

  “Rags?”

  “Faith, Rags was black, and was given to us by Mr. Riggs when his good wife was taken to the Lord, and was obliged for business reasons to go to Newport for some weeks, and certainly had no white ear, and was indeed rather ill-natured, in fact we were obliged to give him away, since he did not return from Newport until some damage had already been done to Goody Jennison’s herb garden, the which I regret.”

  Ben wondered how long Charity had been standing in the hallway, a paper clasped to her square breast and Sultan lying on her shoes. She might have been waiting for Ben to smile, since when he did she dislodged the dog with a backward step and brought him the paper, ignoring her elders.

  “My word, Charity!” Faith spoke kindly. “Mr. Cory doesn’t wish to look at pictures.”

  “He told me he did,” said Charity flatly, and laid the paper on Ben’s
knee, leaning close. “This be the one with feathers restored.”

  “Oh, I see.” Confusedly, Ben saw more than that. It had never occurred to him that lines of ink on paper could move and sing. A stream glittered with fragmented ice. Ben could feel the vulnerable pride of the swallow twitching a pert forked tail, tilting a round head toward distant cloud. And how should Charity have made him actually hear the slow yielding of a brook to the coming of spring? Those naked things huddled under the water—swallows maybe, or squirming babies, ambiguous, blind. The eye clung to them, not in laughter.

  “Charity,” said Madam Jenks, “I believe Mr. Carey would prefer to look at pictures another time.”

  Charity tried to ignore that. In nearness she was all little-girl softness and warmth, electric. Little?—thirteen.

  “Charity,” said Madam Jenks, “go and aid Clarissa with the refreshments. You should have remembered it before.”

  Ben blurted: “Charity, this is beautiful.”

  “Charity,” said Madam Jenks.

  Charity inhaled carefully. “Very well, Mama, I will leave the room.”

  The red comb popped. Ben had been half-prepared for that, and for the deferential scramble he now performed. Under cover of the commotion Charity vanished with the picture, Sultan gloomily following.