by Jodi Daynard
Some time later, he felt a caress upon his face. He believed it might be real this time. The slit of one eye opened wider: The figure looked like a friend he once had, long ago. Her rich brown hair tumbled onto her bosom. Her amber eyes behind rimless spectacles filled with tears. She asked, grave-faced, “Can you tell us your name?”
Johnny shut his eyes. He was awake now, and conscious. Why did he suddenly feel like joking?
“George Washington,” he said.
The girl frowned. “And what is four plus four?”
“Nine. A gluttonous sum.”
A tiny smile crept to the corner of his mouth. One of the women whispered to another. It sounded like, “Did you hear him, Abby? That’s Johnny. He hates it when others concern themselves for him.”
At the mention of his name, Johnny knew that it was no dream. What’s more, he knew where he was. He was in Quincy, in Lizzie’s cottage, in the same bed in which his mother had given birth to him twenty-two years earlier. Eliza, seeing her son return from the dead, burst into tears. The others raced off to procure various remedies, eager to tend their patient now that they had one.
His lungs had been damaged in the near drowning. Lizzie prepared tinctures for his tea from precious mullein that she’d gathered, dried, and ground herself. She made him a fragrant plaister, too, one she often used on consumptives, lathering it so thick that Eliza was moved to remark, “You look as if you’re making a cast of him, for a statue.”
“Perhaps I am.” Lizzie smiled down at her patient, who could do little more than breathe in and out.
And while Johnny was soon able to take a few steps, even walking across Lizzie’s small parlor made him short of breath. He thought mordantly, I shan’t be helping the old man carry stones up Penn’s Hill any time soon.
When the weather finally warmed, everyone went to work in the fields. Thomas Miller, Tom, and Will worked the distant field. Johnny sat bundled to his chin just beyond the barn by the closer, smaller one. Although the air was brisk, yellow and purple crocuses had begun to spring up here and there. He watched in admiration as the women broke up the heavy winter ground. Each day it was as if he, and the earth, were born again. The fields began to come to life beneath the women’s diligent prodding.
Johnny listened to the women as they conversed upon one subject or another:
“Oh, but I forgot to mention I procured some indigo for that petticoat you wished to dye,” Lizzie said one day. They were placing dried beans in the neat rows of holes they had previously dug.
“Indeed,” Johnny’s mother replied. “We’re so busy, I know not when I shall have the time. And that reminds me, Lizzie. We’ve had a letter from Martha. Did you see it on the kitchen table? She’s invited us to attend her Friends meeting Tuesday next. They’ll be discussing that couple from Georgia. You know, those poor souls I mentioned to you last week.” Here, Eliza looked about her as if someone inimical to the abolitionist cause might be eavesdropping. But she saw only her son swaddled in his blanket. Johnny smiled at her, and she grinned back.
The endless talk of the women, which used to annoy him and for which he teased Eliot mercilessly, now had quite the opposite effect: he felt he could listen to them forever. The voices healed his wounded soul. They anchored him in time and place.
But Johnny was subject to moments of despair as well, especially when he came to realize that his mind had been affected. He could remember nothing from the moment he left the President’s House until he woke up in Quincy. When he tried to read, his head ached, and the words vanished almost at once. Sometimes he asked a question and, several moments later, would ask it again. At these times he saw his mother exchange a look with Lizzie, but he knew not what it meant.
One evening, reading upon a book, Johnny’s head ached so severely that he shut the book and clasped his head despairingly.
“Patience, Johnny,” Lizzie said, placing her hands upon his shoulders.
Patience had never been one of Johnny’s strengths. The moment he was able to walk abroad, he did so. One of the women always ran to his side, fearful he would topple; he walked like a drunken sailor. Often, Kate accompanied him. Johnny had only recently learned that upon hearing the news of his accident, Kate flew to Quincy from New York and remained there nearly a month. Now that he was out of danger, she had returned to Cambridge but visited him frequently.
At first, they strolled about the kitchen garden. Then they moved beyond the garden to the fields. They stopped to watch the men and boys working hard to make certain the harvest would be fruitful. But the sight of the men and boys working pained him. He felt so useless.
Reading his countenance, Kate said, “There will be years and years for work, Johnny. Have no fear.”
They made their way down to the shore. Spring was in effulgence now; the trees had unfurled their tender fronds, and the sparrows had returned, infesting the bushes by the hundreds and making a great ruckus. Custard-yellow daffodils shivered in the breezes, and once more the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer could be heard echoing across the village.
On one of their walks that June, a strange thing happened. As they made their way down to the water, two Negroes disembarked from a small boat. One of them was a short, slender woman of middle age. Another was a younger man, very dark-skinned. They looked familiar to Johnny. Suddenly he grinned and cried out to them. “Cassie? Cassie! Isaac!”
“Nay, Johnny,” Kate said, “that’s not Cassie or Isaac.” She led him back to the cottage, but before they had reached it, he realized what his feelings toward those Negroes had been: they were those of a kinsman. He stopped before the cottage door and thought, I’m no longer white. White Johnny is dead, drowned in Boston Harbor. I shan’t ever be white Johnny again. It was a good thing. But he began to cry for all his lost white dreams.
Slowly, Johnny healed. It was now July, and his mind began to assert its natural curiosity. One morning, after the others had gone into the fields, Kate remained behind to have breakfast with Johnny. He was quietly munching on a biscuit when, out of nowhere, he set it down and blurted, “But Kate—I simply must know. Why did your marriage fail?”
Kate laughed at his boldness, especially since he himself had not offered a single word on the topic of Miss Burnes. She took a moment to consider her reply. Finally she said, “There was nothing very wrong with Mr. Pearce, apart from the usual male vanity. But I felt—suffocated, Johnny. So suffocated I thought I would throw myself out a window just to breathe!”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Johnny replied somberly.
Kate went on to say that Mr. Pearce did not approve of her work on the magazine. He wanted her to devote her energies to her new home and to start a family.
“But did you not know this about him previously?” Johnny inquired.
Kate looked at her hands in her lap, then fixed her amber eyes directly upon Johnny’s. “We know things when we know them, not when we should know them. Don’t you find that to be true?”
Johnny did find that to be true, but he did not say so. Instead, he asked, “And where is he now, this Mr. Pearce?”
Kate smirked. “You always did call him ‘this Mr. Pearce.’ I wonder why? Anyway, he’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Kate nodded. “Yes. His ship was attacked on its way to England, and he was killed in the skirmish. Poor man. We knew nothing of it for several months.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I grieved for him as I grieve for any lost life. But as for the marriage, I must admit that I was not greatly wounded by its loss.”
“Oh, I’m relieved,” said Johnny.
Kate looked at him pointedly and added, “Shallow feelings are to thank for shallow wounds.”
Although Johnny thought he caught her meaning, months passed before Kate was able to speak directly of the hurt Johnny had caused her. Johnny knew she waited for him to speak about himself and Miss Burnes. He knew he would need to share his story, if only to repay Kate’s candor with his own
. But he wasn’t ready. Instead, as if testing his powers of narration on simpler topics, he began to speak of his travels.
As they all sat at dinner, Johnny described the rivers he had crossed, the forests he had traversed, and the great sea views he had enjoyed. He described New York’s colorful harbor and genteel, sheltered Baltimore. He praised Philadelphia as the most beautiful city in the world. And at last, on a fine summer afternoon, as they sat having dinner in the kitchen garden, Johnny described Washington: “When you mount the crest of Jenkins Hill, the Capitol appears before you like a Greek ruin. Delphi, you think. Or the Parthenon. Below it, Pennsylvania Avenue carves a bold path through a marshland to the President’s House. All the rest is but a frontier of clay pits, brick rubble, and toiling black bodies, slick with perspiration.”
Everyone at the table grimaced. Then Johnny concluded, “Yes, there everything holds out the promise of greatness, like monuments to a dream. God grant they achieve it.”
The company was just absorbing Johnny’s somber verdict when little Abby broke the silence. “Johnny, do the Southern girls have pretty dresses?” she asked.
He laughed. “Yes, they do, Abby. Most beautiful dresses.”
By late summer, Marcia had begun to fade in his memory. Or perhaps fade wasn’t the right word, as he remembered her cleft chin, her green eyes, and her winning smile in perfect detail. But just as an Old Master portrait loses its greatness when exposed as a clever forgery, Johnny’s image of Miss Burnes was forever ruined by his knowledge of her falsehood.
It was nearly September when Johnny finally spoke of her. He and Kate were on the shore, enjoying the last of the warm summer days. They had removed their shoes and buried their feet in the sand. They lay back with their eyes closed. Johnny recalled the time he had lain just so with President Adams, when the old man had asked Johnny’s advice concerning the Mazzei letter. Kate reminded Johnny of the pink shells she had gathered those many years ago, and he replied that she had surprised him greatly by challenging Mr. Adams. Then they fell silent; Johnny seemed to doze.
After nearly an hour, he lifted himself on one elbow and turned to Kate.
“Kate? I’m ready to speak. But I’m afraid to—I’ve no wish to—hurt you.”
Kate sat up at once, looking roiled. She had been Patience itself for months. Now she inquired pointedly, “Whose feelings do you consider, Johnny? Mine—or your own?”
“I—” he faltered. “You’re right. It’s my own feelings I fear. But come sit by me now, and I’ll tell you what I know. I can do no more than that.”
“Then I will listen.”
Johnny helped Kate up and they moved off to a place nearer to the cottage, more protected from the wind.
“From the moment I saw Miss Burnes, I felt myself to be hopelessly in love. Why this was so, why it happened so swiftly, is still a puzzle to me. But I know it cannot have been because of her character, for I knew nothing of her character then. To me, she was a part of everything that I loved about Moorcock—the great good cheer, the wild foxhunts, Mr. Jefferson, and even the danger that seems to go hand in hand with all their sport. That life called out to me for its beauty and excitement. Oh, I wanted it desperately, the more so because I knew I could never have it.
“Miss Burnes was very beautiful,” he continued. He thought he saw Kate flinch and hastily added, “Oh, not deeply so. I mistook a bauble for a diamond. But I was just a boy, pretending to know many things of which I was wholly ignorant.”
Johnny grimaced and gripped his head as if struck by a sudden pain. But the pain soon eased and, wiping his eyes, he continued, “I do believe she truly loved me for a time.” He looked down at the sand, smoothing it with one hand as one might a blanket. “I should like to believe that, had I accepted her way of life, she would have accepted me.”
At last, Kate spoke. In a soft voice she asked, “Do you really think so, Johnny? Would she have been willing to sacrifice the good opinion of all her peers, her friends, and even her country, as your mother did for your father?”
At the mention of his mother, Johnny’s eyes widened. He pursed his lips. “No,” he finally said. “One cannot compare them.”
Kate thought she had worn down his last delusion when Johnny moaned, “Oh, Kate, I shall never be a senator or statesman. I shall never be a great man.”
But Kate was smiling.
“For goodness’ sake, why do you smile?”
“Because you are fortunate.”
“Fortunate? How?”
“Great men are nearly impossible to love. They spend months and years away from home, and when they are home, they’re restless. Their minds are often elsewhere, pondering the Eternal Questions. Ask Abigail if you don’t believe me. Nay, a good man is far easier to love. And you are good, Johnny, though sometimes you can be quite stupid.”
At this comment, Johnny laughed out loud, but Kate burst into tears, and Johnny held her to him. After the tears had been shed, they talked and talked. Kate confessed that she had loved him from his first day in America, that first morning, when his hair was wild about his head, his feet were bare, and his gaudy beads made a terrible racket as he and the children scampered across the floor.
Johnny told Kate that he’d loved her ever since that one kiss at Christmastime, which had so confused him.
“Yes,” Kate laughed. “I pitied you greatly then, for I could see by the look of horror on your face that you thought you needed to propose to me then and there.”
“I should have,” he replied somberly.
In early October, Johnny was fitted for spectacles, which his doctor thought might ameliorate the headaches. Johnny joked that it was thanks to the glasses he could now appreciate Kate’s every detail: the way her own spectacles misted when she felt emotion, the way she cocked her head when she was puzzled. When Johnny looked at Kate, he did not need to see all of her to know he loved her. A fingernail would suffice. The turn of a hip. The bare hollow of her neck. Any place, he thought, that beat with the pulse of her heart.
Autumn finally came, and Johnny was soon occupied with all the lively goings-on at the cottage. He enjoyed the smell of pies baking and the sight of the women as they sat together and darned their petticoats in companionable silence. Thinking all the while of Eliot, he watched as baskets of harvest bounty appeared about the house: apples and grapes, corn and wheat. Here is so much bounty, he thought. There was bounty, too, in watching Lizzie, his mother, and sometimes even Abigail from across the room, these extraordinary women, experts of the here and now.
56
ONE MORNING THAT OCTOBER, THE POSTMAN ARRIVED with a letter for Eliza. She took the letter, which, to judge by its besmirched appearance, had come a very long way.
“It’s from Cassie,” she said, closing the door upon the bracing air. Cassie did not often write, and Johnny’s mother looked alarmed.
She tore open the letter. Her eyes scanned the page, and Johnny saw the tears come.
“What does she say?” Johnny asked. He was leaning over his mother’s shoulder and straining to see the words on the page.
“Your grandma is dead.”
“Oh, poor unhappy thing!” Johnny cried. “Poor, poor Grand-mama! We were not there! It’s my fault you remained here so long.”
“No,” she said. “Not really.” Eliza cried a little, but then she was seized with a thought that seemed to amuse her. “Mama insisted she was at death’s door before you were born, Johnny. But once she laid eyes upon you, I do believe she lost her taste for illness.” She smiled. “Well, in any case, I must return. It’s high time. Do you wish to come with me? I don’t recommend it, as you’re only just recovered. But if you truly wish it, I could not deny you.”
“Oh, I long to see Cassie!” he cried. Johnny thought about Cassie and Isaac and his old home. He recalled the hucksters, Madame Pringle, and Reverend Nicholls. He remembered the sandy beaches and how he used to ride on the backs of the turtles, though he was probably too big for that now. “Well, I�
�ll think about it, Mama,” he finally said.
The cottage remained somber that afternoon, when Lizzie and Thomas learned of Margaret Boylston’s death. Not because they loved the old woman very much—they had seen firsthand the suffering she had caused their friend. No, it was because Eliza and possibly Johnny would leave them for many months, and sea travel was never safe.
When she learned the news, Kate returned to Quincy to say good-bye. Johnny saw her alight from the carriage through the parlor window. Her hair, as usual, had been pinned in haste and fell down about her shoulders. At the sight of her, his heart lifted with such joy that tears came to his eyes.
“Kate! Oh, Kate!” he called, but she didn’t hear him, and so he ran to the door to meet her.
All that day, a great bustle of activity ensured that there would be no privacy for them. The women fretted about what Eliza needed to pack, what would be needed upon the ship, which departed from Boston the following week, and what she would take to give to others. It was a cold day, and everyone was within. The children seemed to be everywhere. It was only after everyone had taken supper and retired to bed that Kate and Johnny were able to sit alone in the kitchen. Kate had made them some coffee, for neither had any thought of sleeping.
Kate took a sip of her coffee and then began. “So, I expect you shall accompany your mother to Barbados? I’ll miss you.”
Johnny considered the question for a long moment. Then he reached across the table for Kate’s hand, which she proffered. “Nay. I wish to stay just here, with you.”
They were married the day before his mother’s departure, in the North Parish meetinghouse. In attendance were John and Abigail Adams, Martha and Harry Lee and their children, Giles and Bessie, and, of course, the entire Miller family. Miriam surprised everyone by tossing pink seashells at them as they left the church, which had them all covering their heads, and which turned Mr. Adams quite red in the face.