by Janet Benton
On his left hand, a scar shone where the pinkie and ring fingers should have been. I gasped.
Johan glanced at me, then averted his eyes. “My hand slipped. At the steel mill.” He said this as if it hardly mattered.
“How terrible,” I said, finally able to speak. He nodded impassively, looking at the far-off lobby wall.
Such coldness from a man who ought to beg my pardon. How did this injury figure into his return to Philadelphia? I wondered if Olivia had rejected him.
Peter put his face directly before mine. “Tell us! What is thee doing here?”
“There’s nowhere else I can be,” I replied. “Why has thee come?”
“But why can’t thee be anywhere else?” asked Johan.
Beneath my shawl, I squeezed Charlotte gently. She gave out a string of peculiar sounds, kicked her legs, and wriggled. A puzzled Johan observed my moving shawl. I pulled the cloth away and our baby inclined her head toward the men, eyes blinking against the gaslight.
The whole truth penetrated Peter at once; the hue and curl of Charlotte’s hair left little doubt as to her paternity. He dropped his face to his dirt-stained hands. But Johan stared at the baby, furrowing his brow.
“Whose child is this?”
“Can’t thee tell?” I asked, offended.
Charlotte kicked her legs and expelled air in grunts, pleased with herself for existing.
“Why didn’t thee answer my letters?” said Johan fiercely. “I went to the post office every day I could for the entire year.”
He was going to lie? Gorge rose to my throat. “Letters? I received none.”
“I sent them,” he insisted. “I pleaded for letters back. Thee doubts my word?” He stood and dumped his satchel to the floor.
I took in a breath and prepared to tell him that I certainly did doubt his word. But Peter raised a hand to stop our argument. He moved closer, so that I smelled the sawdust that must be in his very veins.
“I got thy letter,” he said. “We came right away.”
“Right away? I wrote in Fourth Month! I worried and worried when I didn’t hear.”
“I wasn’t expecting mail till I wrote Father for money. I only went to the post office this week.” His color rose as Johan rolled his eyes. “The point is, Johan and I returned as soon as we learned thee wasn’t well. To help thee.”
To help thee! That precious sentiment. But Johan had already gotten that chance through the solicitor. I looked at him; his stiff face seemed to be holding back an unsorted mass of feeling. As I watched, he surrendered his weight to the cool marble floor, stretched his long legs forward, and stared at Charlotte. His expression moved from sorrow to confusion. The broad planes of his cheeks became mottled, and he turned to me.
“If this is our child,” he demanded, “why didn’t thee write to tell me?”
“I had no address!” Frustration tightened my throat. “Then a solicitor visited thee in Pittsburgh. But thee was married to Olivia Stone and denied knowing me!”
Johan snorted. “A solicitor? Found me married?”
“Why didn’t Father help?” Peter asked. “Why not go home?”
“I couldn’t, with a baby and no husband. Besides, Patience told me never to come back.” I reached to my neck and fingered the scab from the rock she’d hurled.
“Get outta here!” called a deep voice. A hostile rumbling spread among the would-be sleepers. I struggled to my feet and pointed to an archway leading to a carriage bay.
Peter lifted my valise. Johan held my arm with his good hand. I tucked Charlotte close, and together we walked there and settled onto a set of moveable stairs.
We sat in silence, momentous concerns suspended between us like moisture after a heavy rain. To my one side, Peter turned his head so as not to be seen; the fall of his shoulders suggested grief. Charlotte settled in the shawl sling at my front, poking out her tiny toes and waggling them. To my other side sat Johan, who reached his unhurt hand forward to encompass Charlotte’s feet. The shackles on my heart opened slightly, exposing wounded flesh.
What higher wisdom had lured me off that train toward Pittsburgh?
“I named her Charlotte, after my grandmother,” I told him.
His eyes warmed in his dirt-streaked face. “She’s truly ours?”
“There’s no other possibility.”
“Dearest,” he said in a thick-throated voice. “I never should have left thee!” He bent his head and placed his lips over mine, then cupped his hands at my cheeks, framing our kiss.
The odors of his unwashed body were strong. His velvety mouth pressed mine with too much fervor. I disliked it until I smelled his breath—like fresh-shucked corn. His breath always had been sweet, as if it spoke more of his soul than of his body. But he seemed to have forgotten Peter beside us, the infant in my lap, our dirty and disheveled state, our year of separation. I pulled away to find Peter wiping his eyes and staring ahead. Johan stroked my cheek with a finger, watching our baby as she drifted toward sleep.
I sent two prayers into the ether: that Johan’s claim of constancy would prove true, and that I could find a way to accept him back into my damaged heart. And in this odd configuration—or so I hoped—four outcasts began to assemble their souls into a little family.
* * *
The next morning, Peter and Johan got their hair trimmed and beards shaved at a barber’s, then rented us a room. They left me and Charlotte out of the story they told the property owner in her Market Street office. On the promise of two men’s gainful employment, along with Peter’s pocket watch for security and six dollars for the first month’s rent, she was willing to lease them a large, third-story room in one of her many buildings. It’s below Girard Avenue, a half-mile or so from the Schuylkill River—near to the noise and soot of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, but a thousand times better than the street.
The vigilance that kept me upright on the street burned out as soon as we had shelter. For days I had much trouble rising from a horizontal position. I did manage to write Father, telling him nothing but my new address and asking him to forward any letters that Johan might have sent to Germantown. I expressed the matter as urgently as I dared.
The days have passed with no word from Father, and keeping Johan at bay is difficult. On being anywhere near my body, he wants to touch. If Peter isn’t in the room, and sometimes when he is, then to press against me, to stroke my neck, to smell and embrace me is Johan’s main intent. He seems never to have left that place of naïve pleasure we occupied before he went away. In fact, during the hardships of Pittsburgh, he says he lived in a frenzy of desire, with its object being to hold me close, and its pain being…well, he claims he believed that a lack of love kept me from answering his letters.
Shortly after arriving in Pittsburgh, he found rich fodder in a tattered copy of a chapbook called Leaves of Grass by a man named Whitman, whom Johan called the Camden bard. “Listen,” he said the first time we were alone, when Peter had gone out to buy food and furnishings. He read these lines and more from the book that lies beside me now:
I love you, oh you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea….
O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust each other if it must be so.
But Whitman’s lines did not enchant me. For such sentiments proclaim the glory of indulgence without a single glance at its dangers—its dangers to a woman, in particular, who believes the words of a quivering and openhearted man whose body lies naked over her. This sort of man is a hazard to womankind, for he departs with satisfaction, “free and lawless,” yet leaves her paying, paying, all her life.
I’ve tried to explain to Johan my hard-won understandings. But he considers them “merely circumstantial”; if he’d known of my pregnancy, he says, he would have come to marry m
e, and I would have kept the faith he lives in. “There’s nothing suspect,” he told me, “in the passion that the Camden bard expresses.”
But there is no such thing as merely circumstantial. Circumstances are all. What has occurred can’t be undone. The chasm between us makes me lonely.
Will I ever tell Johan that I ate from sidewalks, took laudanum for dissolute days, begged for pennies, drugged babies through my breast? Will I confess to having earned a dollar of my purse by sexual congress, tried to become a man’s paid strumpet, stolen a baby’s gown, pondered taking my own life when the callous world piled insults upon me?
Will I one day tell our daughter that her early months were lived in exile and deprivation—that she faced mortal hazards then?
Do secrets matter? No one life can be entirely shared by another.
Yet I’m marked by these trials, and he doesn’t know why.
As he is marked by his trials.
He sleeps the sleep of the untroubled, however, even on the floor (for he and Peter gave the small mattress to Charlotte and me).
When I sleep, trouble dogs my dreams. I’m on the street again, with Charlotte dying or being taken from my arms; or I’m struggling to get her from the almshouse before she starves; or my breasts have turned to stone, when she needs my milk to live.
The sores on my feet have healed. I can tolerate the rub of stockings and shoes.
Sixth Month 30
Peter has finally found work, at a printer’s. For six ten-hour days, he’ll earn fourteen dollars a week—far more than the twenty-five a month I earned toiling day and night for the Burnhams. He despises working with enormous machines, but he says that a room of loud presses will be far better than the open-hearth department at the steel mill, where he did common labor. He’d return to Father’s workshop, he said, if he could.
For his part, Johan’s had no luck at finding work because of his damaged hand and is spending less and less time trying. The good side of this is his increased time with Charlotte. She no longer cries when he holds her. The tenderness in his demeanor soothes her—and me, to watch it.
He seems an honest man. Did the solicitor find a different Johannes Ernst, another red-haired Pittsburgh resident? I must have evidence. I can’t risk another fall.
Yesterday Charlotte was three months old. She shows so many skills. She laughs, squeals, and tries to lift her head while on her stomach. She clasps her sticky hands together and reaches for her feet. To know a thing, she opens her mouth to encompass it. Peter carved her a wooden rattle, and she clutches the handle in her fist, then crams its orb into her mouth as far as it can fit, licking. Into that cave she moves every item she can reach—the side of my hand, an edge of my shawl. All the while, she makes a clear, declarative sound: “Ah! Ah!”
As if to say, “I am! Look what I can do!”
Sometimes when the men talk, she becomes too distracted to continue nursing; she turns sideways to stare. She sends them the exploratory beginnings of letter sounds—a v and a d. Then, in place of feeding, she arches her back and pushes against me until I lay her on the ground. Her father and her uncle help her practice rolling over.
She seems so vital, yet I worry about the lasting effects of her hard weeks. No doubt there will be some. What indelible impressions have formed already in her?
The first time I saw a monarch butterfly and pointed, Mother told me, “Butterfly.” I memorized the word, matching it to the tubular body, the antennae, the ochre and black wings. “Butterfly,” I intoned with effort. Until one day another winged being flew by, clothed in different colors. Upon inquiring, I heard, “Butterfly.”
Confusion beset me. How could it be?
By this I came to understand the notion of a category. Mother, Father, and brother are people; monarchs and other floating beings with chalky wings that land on flowers and suck their milk are butterflies. Yet the monarch remains my original butterfly. Every other seems a displacement.
What original butterflies have lodged themselves in Charlotte’s brain? What representatives of categories are in permanent place? Might she, for instance, seek unsafe or chaotic streets in her future, or circumstances of privation, finding them to hold an oddly familiar comfort?
Oh, dear baby, flesh of my flesh…I want better for thee.
Seventh Month 2
Johan noticed the scar on Charlotte’s bottom—the remnant of her sore—and wanted to know how she’d been injured. In halting sentences I told him of her confinement at the almshouse, then took us backward in time to Gina’s, the Burnhams’, Gerda’s, the Haven, even to my months with Father and Patience. I spoke as sparely as I could, with subdued expression, because otherwise I might have been overcome. Then I brought him quickly past our homeless days, leaving out the incidents with Albert and the begging and the hunger and so much more, and commencing again with that afternoon before he and Peter found me, when I sat with Charlotte under the pear trees. I reminded Johan of what he’d showed me in an apple. I told him that wanting to show Charlotte the star inside a fruit had given me a reason not to die—as foolish as that sounded.
“So thee understands,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing.
“What?”
“How much the common beauty means.”
“Of course. But not just beauty.” I explained my notebooks, and how I’d survived by telling, held on through the daily increase of these pages.
“Held on? Survived? A reason not to die? What don’t I know?”
I flushed.
“I’m sorry.” He brought my hand toward his mouth and pressed the back of it to his lips. “I’ll never read thy diaries. I owe thee that.”
This made me lonelier. Can’t I ever tell anyone all that happened? Not even Johan will insist upon it? If he had diaries, I would want to read them.
Seventh Month 3
Charlotte and I had a visitor this morning, shortly after Peter left for work and Johan went to offer himself at more shops and businesses. The visitor stomped up three flights of stairs and sent a strong knock through our room.
“Who is it?” I called. I had on my Mother Hubbard dress, and my hair was loose and frowsy.
“Thy father,” came the low, stern voice.
Charlotte was napping on our mattress in a corner. I ran and propped a pillow to hide her, then moved a chair to block his view further, draping a skirt across it. I grabbed the drying diapers from the line that hangs wall to wall and stuffed them beneath the mattress.
His voice shot through the room: “Open the door, Lillian.”
I did. Father strode in, dressed in his work clothes, sprinkled with sawdust and drops of shellac, glowing with exertion. The room shrank around his presence.
“Father,” I said, offering my hand.
He stared as though seeing a ghost. The force of will that had propelled him across town dwindled and sputtered out. “Thee looks like thy mother. And as thin as she was before she died.”
Couldn’t he see the life surging in me? Or had I died for him when she did? That frightening thought clicked into place as I pointed to our small table and chairs, thankful that Johan had found them on the street and hauled them up. “Please sit,” I offered. “I’ll make tea.”
He sat and looked dully at one of the walls I hadn’t yet washed, with its grime and ripped paper. After removing his broad-brimmed hat to a chair, he rubbed his face with thick, muscled hands. I dipped our one pot into a water bucket—filled at the hydrant three stories down—and placed the pot on the stove. I stayed to let the stove’s warm currents bathe me, despite the gathering heat. I looked at the chipped pottery upon the nearby shelf, the few rations, the painted horse that had passed from Margaret’s father to Margaret to me, and wondered. What strangers occupied this space before us? A hook for a stirring spoon hung on the wall. Who’d put it there? At home I knew it was Mother, or Grandmother, or Great-grandmother. When I replaced a spoon on its hook, my hand and forearm moved in the layers of their similarly shaped hands and arms
doing the very same. I was taking part in a palimpsest of gestures.
This was the modern way: my one hand, a new tin spoon, a hook put in by someone I would never know. Samuel de Jong in his daughter’s apartment, waiting for tea.
“How is thy work as a governess?” he asked. “Does the family live in this building?”
I’d forgotten about that ruse. “I’ve—I’ve left that work.”
My father nodded and waved his hand, urging me closer. “Come. I’ve brought things for thee.”
I walked to him and sat, feeling the warmth emanating from his person and the anxiousness bubbling in mine. He reached inside his leather vest, then paused. “Am I too late to prevent thee from caring for this Johan fellow?”
“It depends on what thee has for me,” I replied.
He withdrew a thin packet from his vest. Sighing, he laid it on the table and opened the paper wrap to reveal a short stack of envelopes. “I didn’t want thee to be encouraged,” he said.
I froze in place. The longed-for missives! Which Father had intentionally withheld!
“Here.” He thrust the envelopes forward. I hesitated. “Take them,” he demanded.
I did. The one on top had been much smudged and abused on its journey from Pittsburgh. I broke the seal and withdrew a single sheet written in Johan’s loose and generous hand. He professed his ongoing love and his wish to marry as soon as he’d saved enough at the steel mill and located suitable chambers. The date was Eighth Month, Day 10, when I was two months along. He’d sent the address of their lodgings; I could have gone and married him before my pregnancy became evident. I glanced at the other postmarks: Tenth Month, Day 3, when I was still living at home, four months along; and Third Month, Day 30—the day after I’d birthed our daughter.