by Sally Cabot
39
ANNE WROTE OUT THE short, bare sentence with care: In a month’s time I leave for London with a friend. She read the note over and found its bareness its greatest fault but could find no way to make it more. She tore the paper across and wrote on the small piece that remained: I should like to speak with you alone. She waited three days to find him in a quiet corner in the shop where she could slip the note into his hand.
He came that night, and she recognized even in his knock what a different man he was from Franklin; two strong raps, no more, as spare with his raps as he was with his words, but each with its own conviction. As he came in she remarked the change in him, more noticeable here in the privacy of her room than amongst the commotion of the shop: the drawn face, the coat looser on the lank frame, the eyes on her face but the attention elsewhere. She began, as she hadn’t intended, at the end.
“In a month’s time I leave for London.”
The eyes snapped back to the room, to Anne. “Alone?”
“With a friend.”
Grissom said nothing.
“A mutual friend.”
“You’re sure?”
What did he mean? Was she sure she would go or was she sure of the friend? But what matter his meaning? In either case, the answer was the same. “I’m sure.”
“Very well.” Grissom turned to leave, but Anne reached out and touched his arm to hold him. She felt the need of more words, the need to add that Grissom had more than enough girls in the shop for the work that was coming in, that he didn’t need her, that it was best she go, but none of it would form up just as she wished it. She said, “May I ask how your wife fares?”
“She begs to die, that’s how she fares.”
“What does the doctor say of it?”
“He says her heart is strong. Over and over he says it, and she grows upset when he does, thrashing about, weeping. This last visit she refused to see him. She said to me, ‘Tell him to go away and let me die.’”
Anne stood struggling for words that might be of any comfort, but finding none, decided to take her lesson from Grissom—to leave words alone. She returned her hand to his arm—a brief touch only—but it seemed to loosen him. He went on.
“She doesn’t even want me near. She pushes me away. She begs to die and I beg her to live.”
“But if she lives only to suffer—”
“I wish her to live as she was before! Alive and happy in my arms!”
A child’s wish, thought Anne, which must have been what moved her to speak to Grissom as if he were a child. “You must gather yourself. You must get back to your shop. Elisha isn’t yet ready to manage it alone. If you busy yourself—”
“Busy myself! Busy myself! Do you not think I try to work? I stretch and tack the cloth and think only what change I might find above stairs when I return. I climb the stairs and find a little less of her each time, as if I take something of her away whenever I leave her side. Elisha is not ready, you say! Busy myself, you say! As if it was so simple a thing. But you who don’t allow of love, how are you to know?”
Grissom stopped. A visible effort to tamp down one line of talk and heave up another overtook him, and after a time he seemed to succeed. “I beg your pardon. You do allow of one love, and I of all men may attest to the power of it. William does well?”
“He goes to London with his father to study law.”
“I see.” Another pause. “And does he know of the relation—?”
“He does not.”
“Perhaps, then, in London he will learn of it.”
Anne could not deny that the plan had crossed her mind. Away from Philadelphia, away from Deborah, Anne would have her chance at last—or so she’d thought before—but now, hearing the idea come out of Grissom’s mouth she heard its flaw: To reveal herself to her son in London, she must reveal herself in the guise of what he’d no doubt believed her to be all along—his father’s whore.
A fierce urge to ask Grissom’s advice over this conundrum overwhelmed Anne—surely this man of all men would understand how she longed to claim her son in some small way without disgracing him—but as she looked at Grissom again she saw that a man so tortured could be of no help to her; he could understand nothing right now but his own suffering. For perhaps the first time it was Grissom who needed Anne’s help, and thinking this, understanding this, she discovered in herself a desperate wish to help Grissom in return. But what could she possibly do for such a man in such a way? She lifted a hand as if it might even be possible to wipe out some of the pain that was carving up his features, but Grissom caught her hand and pushed it away, pulled it back, pulled her back, into him, crushing her inside his arms.
“Sophie. Oh, God, my Sophie—”
Again Anne could find nothing to say, but Grissom wasn’t after any of her words; she held him as he held her, murmured as he murmured, answered his mouth with her mouth, his hands with her hands, allowing herself to be Sophie for Grissom as she’d doubtless been other women for other men so many, many times before. What was different here? Nothing, she told herself; perhaps it was a different kind of want, but the answer to it was the same.
But it was the wrong answer. Anne saw it as soon as Grissom reared up over her on the bed, even as he released into her, a new traitor’s anguish now painting his features in place of the old. He pushed himself away from her, recovered his breeches, folded himself into them still wet from her, and shuffled out the door, unable to even turn and look at her.
It was good that she would soon be gone, Anne realized, away from these uneasable burdens that weren’t her own.
FRANKLIN SENT A NOTE via messenger.
Enclosed herewith please find stage and room fare for the road. I’ve further secured the driver’s interest in your welfare—should trouble arise you need only look to Mr. Finn. At New York it will be necessary to engage a carriage at the livery next the stage stop; go direct to the White Horse Inn where a room has been arranged. I’ll send word to you there when we’re to sail. Godspeed.
Anne packed her trunk and prepared to make her good-byes. Mary should have been her first visit, but Anne hadn’t spoken to her sister since her betrayal, despite the fact—or perhaps because of the fact—that over the years Anne had come to think Mary right all along. Mary would like these new plans no better than the old—there could be nothing for either of them in laying down worse blood on top of bad—she’d write to Mary from abroad. She next climbed the stairs with heavy feet to bid farewell to Sophie Grissom, undoubtedly for the last time.
The woman lay in Grissom’s big, soft bed, nearly buried in its folds, the terrible knowledge of her fate plainly visible in her eyes. How did Grissom bear looking into them day after day? Sophie peered at Anne a long time, as if unable to identify her. At length she said, “You go away,” and closed her eyes, but whether she meant it as a statement of fact or an order of dismissal Anne couldn’t decide; as she wished to go away anyway, she went.
The last call she made—surprising herself—was to John Hewe. He saw her coming through the door as if she were the only person in the crowded room and came after her, herding her into the quiet of the hall. “Tell me you’ve come—,” he started, but Anne wouldn’t let him finish a vain hope.
“I come to say good-bye. I travel to London soon.”
Anne was surprised when his eyes filled with tears, so surprised she found herself saying a thing she’d not intended to say the minute before. “I’ve time to go above and say a more thorough good-bye.” When Hewe seemed not to hear, she said, “A gift is what I mean.”
Hewe surprised Anne even more by giving his head a violent shake. “Be off if you’re to be off.”
Anne left with Franklin’s old words chasing after her again: You can’t enchant us all forever, you know.
THE STAGE WAS CLOSE, dirty, smelly, and already filled with an overweight couple and a violently coughing young man. The driver who Franklin had assured her was her friend took no notice of her at all, staring ahe
ad at the road as if it was his sole concern.
She stepped to the front of the coach and looked up at him. “Mr. Finn? I believe you’ve had a word—”
The man looked down at her from the seat’s height, a position that might cause a look of disdain in any man, or so Anne told herself. “Finn’s come into money, took himself off. Shandy’s the name. Get on if you’re going; we’re an hour behind.”
Anne considered. Resolved. What did she care for this Finn? He might have arranged to seat her beside the overweight woman instead of the coughing man, but little beside. Anne climbed in next to the coughing man, turned her face to the window, and pretended to fall asleep at once, then surprised herself by actually falling into a half doze.
It was long after dark when the stage pulled into the courtyard of a poorly lit inn; the overweight man began to joke with the cougher about who should share a bed with whom, grinning all the while at Anne. Anne pushed ahead of the three of them and entered the inn, walking straight up to the innkeeper. The bed he offered Anne was in fact but half of one, in a quarter of a room, a couple occupying one of the room’s beds and an old woman occupying the other. The old woman stirred as Anne dropped her shoes and slid into the sheets. She smelled of spirits, overused linen, and another thing Anne could only describe as slightly turned ham.
“Where are you coming in from?”
“Philadelphia. And yourself?”
“Here I was born and here I am now. Thirty-four years in.”
The man in the opposite bed called across, “Quiet, there!”
“Ah, stuff yours!” the woman shouted back. “If she is yours!” She cawed.
Whatever the man might have answered, his woman—if she was his—shushed him.
Anne’s bedmate rolled away and began breathing in starts and stops through a congested nose. Anne closed her eyes, but this time she couldn’t even come close to a doze. Thirty-four years. An “old woman” not as old as Anne, intoxicated and foul mouthed. Most likely an old whore. What was it in an old whore that forever showed? Was there something in Anne that had prompted that lewd exchange between the men as they approached the inn, something that had convinced the innkeeper this was the bed in which she belonged? Was this woman what Anne was to become?
Anne slept beside her shadow self perhaps an hour, no more.
THE STAGE RATTLED INTO New York, a place as narrow and cluttered as Pennsylvania was wide and ordered, yet somehow more somber while at the same time sounding twice as loud. The streets turned this way and that as if commanded by the buildings and not the reverse, but Anne found the livery and the White Horse Inn, and a pleasant widow innkeeper who seemed well acquainted with Franklin and interested in taking good care of Anne. She was given a bed of her own, as clean as her own, and fresh water to wash; when she recounted her exhaustion, a plate of bread and cheese arrived at her door. Anne ate, and although it was not four o’clock, climbed between the cool sheets and slept till dawn.
FRANKLIN’S NOTE CAME THE following morning and said simply: We’re aboard. Come. Anne read the note with damp palms. How odd, she thought, that she should remain cool all this long journey till now.
The carriage arrived to collect Anne; her trunk was loaded in and they set off for the wharf, the sunlight beating sporadically through a line of high white clouds, adding and subtracting shadows so fast Anne couldn’t capture any sense of New York’s tumbled-together streets and buildings. To ground herself, she moved her thoughts from where she was to where she was going: London. With her son.
The wharf was mad with carts and carriages and vendors and foot traffic; the tide must have been at the flow, for the ships rode high above the dock. The driver pulled Anne as close to the gangway as he could maneuver, leaped out, and set her trunk down. She swung around for a last word, perhaps only to delay him while she accustomed herself, but already he was back in his seat, whipping the horse ahead through the crowd. Gone.
Anne turned back to the ship, scanning its bustling deck, holding out little hope of finding either of the Franklins in such a swarm, and was surprised to find the elder almost at once, a tall, broad-shouldered man standing at the gunwale, also scanning the crowd. Did he truly tower over all the others aboard the ship or did it only seem so to Anne, as if he might reach up and pull his lightning from the sky where he stood? Once at London, how high might he reach? Standing below on the wharf, it suddenly struck Anne exactly why Deborah Franklin would have wished to stay behind.
But Benjamin Franklin was not the reason Anne stood on the wharf about to tread the gangplank. William was. And there he was, joining his father at the rail, even taller than his father now, similarly dressed in a dark suit meant for traveling but with a flare all his own—a ruffled stock at his neck instead of a plain one. Here was a man grown, ready to follow his father across the sea, but once there, his own life would be waiting for him, his reach for the heavens also unlikely to exceed his grasp. Anne could see his future before him as sharply focused as if it were hers.
But it wasn’t hers; how clear it became as he stood above and she below! And as Anne stared up at the two men a curious thing happened; she heard, as clearly if he stood beside her, Solomon Grissom’s words. You’re sure? She’d begun to lift her hand to signal one of the crew to attend her trunks, but now she dropped it to her side. What was it Anne reached for? A London rooming house somewhere, the kind of house that would allow of gentlemen callers at stray hours, the kind of house where William would likely never go. His father would, of course, but for how long? You can’t enchant us all forever, you know. Anne thought of the guinea-a-lie whores and how long she might carry on that kind of trade; she thought of the woman of the previous night, lying old and stinking in her bed at the inn, perhaps waiting for the chance traveler to drop her a coin. She thought of the solitary man’s interest that might ward off that end, and how long she might count on that interest to hold. Was he a friend? Was she sure?
She wished to answer other. Indeed, she stood some time attempting to call up that other answer, but in the end she could give but one only.
No.
Anne turned her back to the ship, scoured the crowd for a carriage just emptying its fare, and flagged it down. The driver loaded her trunk and pulled away; Anne turned for one last look at the two tall sentinels at the rail, but from that distance she could no longer determine father from son.
40
London, 1760
WILLIAM FRANKLIN WOKE EACH morning asking himself the same thing: Is it a dream? London! If he only ignored the strangling smoke from the coal fires, the beggars, the heaping manure piles that ringed the town, there was nothing of it he didn’t adore. The ancient architecture; the shops full of everything from the finest lace to pistols and swords; the coffeehouses in which he and his father could instantly strike up scintillating conversations with erudite, educated men; the fine English homes whose doors were eagerly opened for this American Benjamin Franklin, already more famous abroad than he was at home.
And then there was the Inns of Court, the most renowned legal institution on earth, where William could walk across six-century-old courtyards, dine under Van Dyck and Titian portraits of kings and queens in the same hall where Raleigh and Bacon had dined, then retire to his comfortable rooms and read in Blackstone’s Commentaries, “The King can do no wrong . . . The King is and ought to be absolute . . . all-perfect and immortal,” and know that he walked over the same ground as this immortal king. Oh, what didn’t William owe his father now?
It was true that the Franklins’ rooms were on the cramped side, that the landlady fluttered about them too much, that she had a prim little daughter William’s father had already begun to push his son’s way. Polly Stevenson was, to all appearances, unencumbered with a single asset beyond her obvious admiration for the elder Franklin, and William had other ideas in mind. He’d seen the whores on the street corners and in the sex shops; there were also any number of women who appeared to be nothing more nor less than willing, and
clearly Polly Stevenson was not, or at least not in the manner William had in mind.
IT DIDN’T TAKE WILLIAM long to find someone who was. He first saw her in one of those dusty London coffeehouses that was tucked up in the back of nowhere; she sat with a number of men and it was clear from the look of her that at least one of those men had expectations that might likely be met before the night was done. William might have moved on at the first words out of her mouth, but the mouth was so plump and it had just been wet by some dusky Madeira; then she leaned down to straighten her shoe buckle and gave William an extended view of as fine a bosom as he’d seen in the entire decade since he’d begun to notice such things. William sat down at the table and struck up the kind of easy conversation he’d first learned on his father’s lap. It soon became clear to the others at the table that they were outmatched; they drifted away, and William purchased his new acquaintance another bottle of wine, accompanied by a barely edible roast duck. When he discovered she lived in a room above the coffeehouse, he offered to make up for the poor meal with another bottle of claret and an escort upstairs to her room—there were few men alive who wouldn’t at least have chanced it—and he was unsurprised when she accepted.
HER NAME WAS MAUDE. The coffeehouse belonged to her brother-in-law, who in exchange for her help in the kitchen allowed her the use of one of his rooms. The room was as expected—passably clean, cheaply adorned—but Maude was both more and less than anything William had anticipated. The utter lack of inhibition, the way she melted open almost as soon as she was touched, this was thrilling and flattering to any man, but he was taken aback by her utter passivity after the thing was done. She didn’t seem to know how to get from undressed to dressed. She didn’t seem to care if he stayed or left. She didn’t seem to understand that another girl might ask for something in exchange for the service provided—at the very least, a promise to return.