The help was all crashing around in the kitchen fixing breakfast. It looked kind of interesting but they didn’t have any time for me, so I went and sat in the parlor and looked at a newspaper that was there. It wasn’t planned for beginning readers like Garvey was so I had a hard time with it, but it kept me busy and the main thing was it kept me quiet, so when a man lodger came in and my first thought was to ask him, “Are you waiting for your wife too?” the newspaper steadied me and I kept my fool mouth shut.
At breakfast the captain told Patience where to go to get passage up the Hudson. He had people in that lodging house from all over, like France and Holland and South Carolina, all of them speaking so outlandish I should’ve thought they’d play rich and deaf too, but they had plenty of opinions and plenty to say. When they heard where we were going, they just poured out advice and warnings and scarey thoughts until I wished Patience had just kept still. People never can see the good of an idea until it’s all done. They didn’t scare me, but I worried they might scare Patience. Except I was rich and deaf, I would’ve asked them what they did other mornings without us for entertainment.
They said our Connecticut banknotes wouldn’t be good out in Genesee. They said speculators had grabbed up all the best farms and ordinary folk couldn’t hope for anything but scrub. They said the British might come swooping down out of Canada any time, like they did before when they burned Buffalo. The British didn’t want us filling up the West and getting to be a great nation, they said. “Jealous,” one said. “No, terrified,” another one said, which didn’t make entirely pleasant listening either but at least it took their minds off of us.
There were women lodging there too, as their regular home. I had it from Patience that there’d been women like us before, because the Bible complained of them, so I naturally wondered right away about these two, but they claimed to be mother and daughter, and after I looked at them a little better I got to believe it, and anyway their faces didn’t shine. I almost sighed out loud. I so much wanted somebody to tell.
Patience wrote a note to Parson and signed my name to it, even though I told her he’d know better than to think I could handle a quill so perfect and elegant in this short while, or ever. She wrote that my friend Miss Patience White and I were in the city briefly and would like leave to call at the convenience of the Reverend Mr Peel and Mrs Peel. Patience hired one of the captain’s servants to carry the note to Parson’s house, and before it seemed possible the servant was back.
I thought he probably hadn’t even gone at all, but no, he had a note from Mrs Peel saying she’d been longing to know me and she couldn’t be more delighted, and she’d be pleased to fetch us as soon after noon as was reasonable, say one o’clock.
It was heartwarming to get such a note, and an all-round relief, but I got such a strange little nervous feeling like I was accountable for Mrs Peel and maybe Patience would think she didn’t amount to much, being so friendly and folksy and not like a New Englander. And maybe Patience would think Parson was an ordinary man, or light or silly or weak or foppish.
Patience read the note over again. She said, “I believe she wrote this standing up and in a hurry.” I stayed nervous. Patience said, “I wonder if everyone in New-York is so warm and open-hearted?” I started hoping. She said, “Oh, sweetheart! Maybe we’re out of stingy country at last!” So I smiled and smiled, until I commenced to wonder what Parson and his wife would think of Patience. Must be I just liked to worry.
Being crammed into the end of an island like that meant the houses had to be hooked together and couldn’t have yards and had to be too tall and have too many stairs, but it also meant New-York was a handy town to get around in, not much ground to cover. Patience went by a little map the captain drew for us, and we found the Albany Basin without trouble even though it was on the other side of town. I thought she was so brilliant, telling how to turn all those corners by a map, but then she showed me how and it was easy.
The basin had a couple of steamboats in it. Patience thought we ought to study them and see if knowing something would take some of my scare out, but it was clear to me that knowing more just meant getting scareder. I wouldn’t go look and she stayed by me. She wasn’t scared. She has a liking for the new. But bad enough we had to ride on one of those boats, without looking at it first and brooding, I figured. I just wished we couldn’t hear either, that sound like a million tuckered-out horses, like a wild teakettle the size of a house. But it could do in a day what sail took two weeks at, and cost less to boot, so what to do? I sort of knew it wouldn’t really hurt us. I was just scared of having a scared feeling.
The agent said the cheap Albany boat was making up a cargo and would leave when it was made. We should have our trunks brought over and ask back every day, he said, and meanwhile enjoy New-York. It was such a comfort to be with Patience and not feel obliged to scowl. He smiled and she smiled, so I allowed myself a little smile too, and when we walked away she said, “It must be our happy faces. There’s a saying, which I now see the truth of, that all the world loves a lover.”
It was really very bad of her to take my breath away in the middle of a street full of drays and dray horses like that. She just smiled at my problem, and try as I might I couldn’t feel very cross.
After dinner I couldn’t keep myself away from the parlor window, but Patience kept calm and read. It seemed a good long wait for Mrs Peel, but that was just me. I won’t speak against that good warm woman. She was not late, she did not keep us waiting, and finally there she was. I knew her by Potiphar. He looked so odd, a big strong horse like him pulling a little light city rig, but he was still my dear Potiphar and the sight of him pleased me so.
I rushed right out without my cloak to give him a hug. He was a kindhearted horse and he took my hug even if he didn’t remember me. How could he know me when I had on a dress and smelled of lavender and Patience? When I said, “Potiphar! Potiphar, honey horse!” he moved his ears like something stirred in his memory. At least my voice was the same.
Then I got up my nerve and looked back at the rig where Mrs Peel was. She was a sort of plumpish, sort of plain-faced woman, giving me a friendly looking-over. “It’s Sam, at last,” she said. “I’m so sorry to be late.”
I said no, no, she wasn’t late, and then Patience came down the steps and put my cloak around me and nodded at Mrs Peel with just a touch of New England frost about her. I was afraid she was blaming Mrs Peel that I ran out in the cold to hug a horse, but I later found out Patience was shy. I’d’ve never guessed it, her with nothing to be shy about.
Mrs Peel said, “Miss White – Sam – do get in,” and right while we were still climbing up she set to talking in a way some folks might’ve thought meant she wanted to be noticed, but I knew it was so we’d feel easy. Just knowing she wanted us to did the job for me. She said how Parson’d told her all about me (which I kind of doubted), and how she’d been so envious because he was the one who got to know me while she stayed home and gave pianoforte lessons to empty-headed, soft, silly, ordinary girls.
She said, “I told him another summer I’d go with him. I would not let him be the only one to have adventures. Or I’d get a van and start off for myself. Disguised as Dan Peel, of course.” And she laughed, like she knew plain enough she could never look slender and elegant, and like she didn’t fret about it. She said, “And I’d keep my eyes open for a boy to help me. I’d do it, too, except that I’m afraid my boy would turn out to be really a boy.”
It was a relief to see Patience’s face turn friendly. I was afraid she might think Mrs Peel was a touch hearty, a touch common, but Patience knew the same as me how uncommon that much kindness is.
In just a few squares – hardly worth hitching up Potiphar for except to show good will – we came to Little George Street and the Peel house and had us a fine welcome on the front steps from Parson and a whole crew of little Peel boys and girls who’d heard all about me too. And I knew that my own natural way was what was wanted, and that
it would be an awful disappointment all around if I was to act like a lady. I just hoped Patience knew so too.
Parson said, “You’ve gone and changed. You’ll have a fight making me believe you’re still Sam at heart,” and he smiled back and forth between Patience and me in a little quiet happy way that made me think he saw everything about us and thought it was grand.
I said, “Patience is fixing me, but it’s uphill work.”
The children begged, “Don’t fix her, don’t fix her!” If only for that I would’ve like them.
I liked the whole family of them, and I just wished they had a better house, worthy of them. It wasn’t bad from the outside, tall and narrow, about what a house had to be in New-York. But inside it was all outdoors brought in, all the messes that belong to be outside, like animals and plants and even a bird, and you could work night and day without getting ahead of a house like that, or making it the kind of fresh neat place Parson’s van was. And naturally a woman like Mrs Peel, with her mind on other things, didn’t work night and day or have much chance of making her hired help do it. You could see why Parson had to get away summers.
Everything cloth was in shreds, and everything wood was scratched deep. Nobody’s got mice enough to need that many cats. There was a soft gray layer of cat hair on everything, including on us after we’d been there a while. Be softheaded about kittens and see what comes of it. I’m not being picky. I always let Pa be the one to drown kittens myself. But I think if I’d lived in Parson’s house I could’ve brought myself to it.
There was a dog too, if such an odd pale flat-faced critter is entitled to the name. But it yapped like a dog, more or less, and had doggy feet so I guess that settles it. Mrs Peel was fond of it and let it get up on her lap, which shows again how big her heart was. It had a little curled-over tail like a hog. It was a lot like a hog, except the feet.
The bird was called a parrot. The children were very proud of it. They made us look at it first thing, and I will say it was a sight, like painted. It was in a cage made of bendy wood. The children said it was unhappy there and it should be on a stand but the cats would get it then. I said, “I’d lay my money on the bird,” and I would too. It was built on the plan of an eagle. It could’ve been a help with the cats. They claimed it could talk, but it never did in my hearing. They claimed it was talking Dutch. That may or may not be so. I knew they believed it, but with somebody like Parson around you have to add a pinch of salt, and they didn’t know that yet. They begged and begged it to say, “Pretty Polly,” and finally it let out a squawk that with a lot of fancy could be taken for that, about like sometimes at night you can fancy the wind is saying something. But to humor them we said yes, sure enough, it truly says Pretty Polly.
They put on a regular show for us, playing the pianoforte, and speaking pieces they had by heart, and showing us pictures they’d made, and examples of their handwriting, and how they could read and turn somersets, until Parson got tired of it all and sent them upstairs.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t like to see children put themselves forward like that, but I could see they only did it to give us the best things they had. The biggest one could read better than me. I was about like the second one.
Then there was a chance to talk to Parson. Patience and Mrs Peel were jawing and laughing on the other side of the parlor. I think they were comparing Parson and me like any two regular husbands. At least I overheard Patience say, “Mine never had enough cake. I intend to see that she gets all she wants.”
I sure liked hearing her call me “mine,” even if it did make me blush and Parson smile. There was no hiding anything from him, not that I cared to hide. The problem was to keep from bragging. I wanted to listen some more, but Parson began asking about our trip and our plans.
While I was telling him the children came stealing down the stairs, and when Parson didn’t yell them back up again, they took encouragement and came on in and sat on my lap and beside me and at my feet. They didn’t bother us. We kept on talking.
Parson said that prices were going up very fast in the Purchase, which was his name for Genesee, because there was going to be a canal run right through it and open it all up. He said the State Assembly was absolutely certain to pass the bill this spring, and just the thought of it had shot up land prices all along the line.
“It’s bad for the kind of price you hoped for,” he said, “and it’s bad for the turnpike towns along the Hudson, but it’s a wonderful thing. Think of it! A ditch three hundred and fifty miles long, floating barges full of wheat and corn and lumber from the Great Lakes to the Hudson!”
I said, “Well, that’ll be some ditch, uphill and down. Water might be a little deeper in the valleys than on the hilltops.”
He explained about locks.
I could see how it might be done, and the heart went out of me. Then I saw the real flaw of it all. “What’s to keep the ditch water from running down the first river it crosses?” I asked him.
He explained about aqueducts. A bridge to get a boat across a river! Any fool could see they’d never manage that, but why did they have to think they could and ruin land prices the very year Patience and me wanted to buy a farm?
Parson said, “So buy. In twenty years you’ll sell your farm for city lots, and be rich.”
“Sell our farm? Who could do that? Anyhow, I don’t want to be rich. I just want to live with my – I want to live with Patience and be happy.”
“You just want to live,” he said, not as a question.
“With Patience,” I said.
“My understanding was that you wanted to bring the wilderness to its knees and call yourself king of all you looked upon.”
“It’s Patience wants that. I want something more like what we can hope to do.”
“Last summer it was what you wanted.”
“I’ve had to get sensible since then. With somebody to take care of now. If one is foolish, the other must be sensible. If Patience was sensible, I’d still be foolish.”
Patience must’ve heard me say her name because she got up and sat in a nearer chair, and Mrs Peel dragged over the stool from the pianoforte. They sat there waiting for what we’d say next. We couldn’t think of anything we wanted them to hear.
But the little girl on my lap had plenty to say. She was about eight. She had big new teeth half grown in, and rosy cheeks, and shiny brown hair. Her name was Dora. She’d been patting my cheek and chin and throat for quite a while, and now she said, “I would always have known you weren’t a boy.” She talked very fast, to make use of us keeping still. She said, “You know what my favorite Sam story is? It’s how one morning Papa couldn’t find his shaving kit, and he looked and looked and looked for it.”
Parson was looking at me with a look that was half prayer and half laugh, and holding his breath.
Dora said, “And he asked you if you had it, and you didn’t, and if you knew where it went, and you didn’t, and he had to ask if he could borrow yours.”
The other children couldn’t keep still past that point, so they all yelled out the rest: “And you didn’t have one. And you had to admit, you’re a girl!”
I bent my head back and laughed until I noticed Patience looking extra-ladylike to make up for me, and then I stopped and said, yes, that was my favorite story too. I said, “Every time I think on it, I laugh like I never heard it before.”
With her little hand on my face again, Dora said, “But that was silly of Papa. I would have always known.”
I said, “Well, he didn’t have your advantages.”
I was glad to be able to make Parson look as happy as he did then, except he maybe carried it too far. He maybe made it run over into relief, like he never did find out till then that I can say the right thing sometimes.
He was just so pleased with me that he invited us to go to a show with him and Mrs Peel that evening. “Nothing fancy – we’ll sit in the pit,” he said. “It’s something you should see while you’re here. Nights in Naughty New-York.�
�
I thought to say I had something else naughty planned, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it naughty, and while I was thinking up another way to say no, I looked at Patience and she was smiling and her eyes were shining and I could see she wanted to go something fierce.
It gave me a little turn to see she wasn’t in the same hurry as me to get back to Heaven. And another little turn to see I couldn’t, from now on, just say yes or no without finding out what she wanted too. It was kind of a hard lesson to get ahold of. I won’t say I learned it once and for all right then. But I did get a start on it.
I said, “We’d be pleased,” and then while they all made plans I thought about how if Patience could make me wait and wish, I could do the same to her, and if what she wanted counted, so did what I wanted, and another time, I thought, I’ll weigh my own wish as heavy as hers before I say yes. And I thought, here I am worried sick about land prices and where to find a place for us, and here she is wanting to see a silly show. Of course she didn’t know about the canal and all there was to worry about, and what a strain it was to play the man’s part and think about dull hard things like land prices. I wanted to spare her, but I did wish I could tell her just enough to make her grateful that I bore it all alone.
After supper at our lodging, we met Parson and his wife and walked to the theater. There was no use taking Potiphar, Parson said – no place to leave him.
I was all settled into a fret, and half enjoying it. I couldn’t help thinking I made a pretty good man. There was Patience, so light and silly, laughing with Mrs Peel and there I was, as gloomy as Pa, trudging along beside Parson, asking him where he thought we should go.
“For cheap land close to market?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“My Susquehanna Turnpike bonds have dropped enough to make me guess the bottom’s fallen out of Greene County. If all you want to do is live, in a country that’s cleared and settled and safe, you could do it there.”
Patience & Sarah Page 15