Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

She laughed into her cocoa.

  “You are a wicked boy. ’Tis no wonder that your letters stole into my heart.”

  “They were your husband’s letters. The thought and passion were his. I merely instructed him how to add a bit of relish.” Couldn’t tell her I’d helped Arnold practice his craft on an earlier fiancée.

  “You make fun of me, treat me like a child. You know as well as I do, John, that relish is all. The shaper of words is as much the author as my Mister.”

  Help me, Lord, I was no match for Mrs. Arnold. She could have worn a wig and sat in my class at King’s, become our valedictorian.

  “Where did you study, if I may be so bold to ask?”

  “In my father’s library, on his lap,” she said.

  I thought of Clara, and the library her planter father might have had on Dominica, tho’ I doubt she’d have enjoyed sitting on this planter’s lap. But Peggy had read all the masters, from Lemuel Gulliver’s creator, Jonathan Swift, to that libertine Rousseau, with his maniacal belief in natural goodness. And I had to be just to Salome—’t was not her charm alone, not the bounce of her bosoms, but the vigor of her mind that had caressed Arnold and confused him.

  I THOUGHT TO VISIT Gert and Clara, but seems I could not. The image of Gert giving up Anne Harding to Major André distressed me. I kept seeing Anne plummet into the marsh, her body rising with some unknown will. I missed Clara in a god-awful way, but I would not carry my bag of bones to the nuns’ parlor.

  I soon became the hermit of Arnold’s house. I would not leave, tho’ I longed to march about the village. Perhaps I did not want to find redcoats and Hessians in the street. And then I was invited to the commander’s ball at British headquarters.

  “There must be a mistake,” I said to the general and his lady. “I am a pariah. It was General Clinton himself who had me sent to Wallabout Bay.”

  “But Major André was fond of you,” said Mrs. Arnold.

  “Then ’tis a strange fondness. He spoke for the Crown at my court-martial.”

  “But you are still connected to him, and hence, you have inherited his aura.”

  Aura, says she. Seems André’s apparition was multiplying in Manhattan—one day I’ll bump into his statue on the Bowling Green.

  “Madam,” I said, “I will not go to Clinton’s ball.”

  “You must,” she said. And she turned to the general. “Ben, enlighten this boy.”

  Arnold had that old embarrassment in his eagle eyes, the look of a man without much language, and I loved him for it.

  He pleaded with his wife. “I cannot force Johnny.”

  “Then at least tell him the consequences,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Arnold, scratching one ear. “Clinton says that if I do not bring ye, John, I should not bother about coming at all.”

  MRS. ARNOLD WORE A GOWN of golden silk with a décolleté that would have broken the heart of a decent man, and sent an indecent one to howl at some imaginary moon. The general wore a dark cape. I dressed in his boots and other borrowed clothes.

  We had no need of a carriage. We simply marched next door and were received with fire, sulfur, and ice. Clinton’s young aristocratic officers shunned Arnold in his shabby uniform while they wore silver brocaded into their collars, silver on their sleeves. They bowed to Arnold and turned their backs on him. But they fawned over Mrs. Arnold, and in a world gone topside-turvy, they fawned over me. I’d become the hero of these little aristocrats, André’s own “apogee,” the most vivid point of his life, even if ’t was based on a bloody court-martial.

  Never mind that they hadn’t given a thought to me while I lay in the Jersey’s hold with a beard I could have used to brush an elephant’s back. I had risen from Wallabout, returned from the dead, and now I was their favorite apparition—André’s living double, tho’ I did not look a jot like him. ’T was the madness of human endeavor, and I was wrapped in its mystery. I could have flung their own ballads into their barbarous British faces: If boats were on land and churches on sea; if redcoats wore blue and rebels loved their king, then all the world would be upside down.

  Clinton danced and drank and talked with Peggy until gossips began to call her “Lady Clinton.” And Arnold stood alone, sipping champagne, satisfied that his wife was caught in the whirlwind of a soldier’s ball. He was a man who seemed not to understand his own loss, that these arrogant officers were not half as brave or aristocratic as his own thumb.

  ’T was Clinton who approached me, looking derelict as he always did, even in decorated sleeves. He longed to capture the whole southland, bombard it as he’d bombarded Charleston in May, and thus put an end to the war, but he could not budge while the French fleet roamed hither and beyond, and George Washington sat in New Jersey, hoping to hector him and reclaim Manhattan. Clinton would send his new bulldog, Benedict Arnold, to burn up Virginia and Washington’s farm. It must have pleased him to think of Arnold as dictator of Mount Vernon.

  “There you are,” he said, as if he were continuing a conversation we’d had but yesterday. “Are you prepared?”

  “Prepared for what, Excellency?”

  “To go along with Arnold when he raids Virginia. He’ll need a lad of your worth. I can offer you a captaincy, with the provincials, of course. You would not be able to keep such a rank.”

  “But I’m a wasteling from your prison ships.”

  “Right you are. No one but you has ever left Wallabout alive…except an occasional madman who decided to swim across the currents and did not drown.”

  “Milord, do you envision me as a raider because I once raided Commissary Loring’s farm?”

  “Do not speak of that despicable man. I should have listened to André. Loring’s a whoremonger and a thief. He sought to build his own private treasury on the back of the king. But I was late in trying to arrest him. He fled with all the wealth of his farm.”

  I fell into a sweat. “Have all his henchmen gone with him? One in particular. Calls himself Fat Tobias.”

  Clinton’s sullen eyes had a cruel glaze. “Captain Stocking, I’m commander in chief. You’ll have to ask my quartermaster about this Fat Tobias. But I haven’t invited you here to haggle. You are, young sir, my honored guest.”

  And he went back to dancing with Mrs. Arnold, while other officers rushed out of his way like scared rabbits and I prowled the deck of this damned ballroom for another face. Hadn’t Clara always been the favored beauty at Clinton’s balls? Hadn’t she danced his officers into exhaustion?

  “Sir,” I asked one of Clinton’s young aristocrats, “I cannot find the commander’s tall protégée. An octoroon who goes by the name of Mistress Clara.”

  He pondered for a moment. “Clara, of course. She has been replaced, Mr. Stocking.”

  “Replaced by whom?”

  “Mrs. General Arnold. Madame said it was not fitting to have a harlot in the house. His Excellency dared not disagree. She has her way with him. He never used to dance at his own balls. Now he dances with her from beginning to end. She has the perfect height for him—Clara, you see, would have made the Old Man look small.”

  And as I watched the Old Man do the minuet with Mrs. General Arnold, both with perfect proportions, like dolls in a doll-house, I could conjure up another dancer, who would have broken the dead calm of this ball.

  Fifty

  I MOONED ABOUT ARNOLD’S ABODE LIKE A MAD- man, banging into furniture. Nearly broke one of Peggy’s precious lamps. If redcoats wore blue and rebels loved their king. In a world gone upside down, my own spirit seemed to flounder somewhere between a nunnery and a prison ship.

  Peggy was in the parlor with her infant, Edward Shippen Arnold. He was a brooder, with her blond hair and Benedict’s hawklike profile. The mistress of the house was feeding him porridge a day or two after the ball.

  “John,” she said, “a woman was here, looking for you.”

  “Old or young,” I asked, “tall or short? Was she an octoroon?”

  “Gracious, no. She was rather
stout, tho’ terribly attractive. Edward’s nurse recognized her, said she was from that place called Holy Ground, swears she was even a prostitute, a poule.”

  She started to laugh. “I was worried. At first I thought she was looking for the general. Nurse says she might have been to the house once before. But the woman was rather brazen, coming here to solicit you.”

  “She never solicits,” I said. “She’s my mother, ma’am. And it must have cost her to come here and destroy your tranquility.”

  Peggy’s eyes bulged like a startled bird. But she was fast, very fast, and she found her composure. She wouldn’t have been caught by Cowboys with secret papers in her stockings.

  “You are a rogue, John. Were you really born in a bordello?”

  “So I have been told. But the tale gets more complex. I have no concrete knowledge of my father. He might have been a pirate, a former page of the king’s…or some mysterious American general.”

  She began to giggle. “You’re worse than a rogue,” she said. “You’re positively wicked. Are you suggesting that my Benedict sired you when he was fourteen or so?”

  “’Tis within the boundaries of what is possible.”

  She clapped her hands. “That’s delicious. Then I’m your step-mama, and I shall oblige you to behave and be attentive to your baby brother, Edward Shippen.”

  “I shall love him like a brother. But did you neglect to notice how disconsolate the general was at the ball?”

  “Which general? Clinton or my own?”

  “They are both yours, madam—” “Peggy, please. I command you to call me Peggy.”

  “Madam, I cannot.”

  I was boiling with rage. I admired the bitch’s intellect, but I did not like her Philadelphia airs.

  “I told you, John, how the young officers slander him, almost to his face. They blame him for André’s death. And my general cannot challenge them. It would destroy the army’s morale. That’s why you must help him. You promised.”

  “I will not go to Virginia with him and maraud the countryside. I will not burn farms.”

  “But you’ll come to England with us. You must.”

  I did not answer Salome but left her with Arnold’s little heir, and the princedom she imagined for him in a motherland that was no longer mine.

  I MARCHED UP BROADWAY to the cadaver of Trinity Church—’t still hadn’t been restored after the fire—and our Canvas Town that had grown bigger and wilder in my absence, as if the British were eating up whatever was valuable and spilling out the waste west of Broadway. The wind howled right off the Hudson, and ice had already appeared, in the first week of December. I could not find a single fence save where the generals lived with or without their wives. Firewood was as scarce as a treasure of doubloons.

  I arrived on Holy Ground—’t was derelict, without a lantern lit. There were the same ditches that the rebels had dug five years before to defend Manhattan. I saw no customers floating about, sniffing the wares of some brothel. Half the houses were closed; the nuns did not parade on a porch, enticing sailors with their silken garments, their telltale bosoms, and the curve of a leg. Not a sailor could be found. I wondered if it was André’s legacy—to erase Robinson Street, annihilate Holy Ground, to punish Clara and Gert in some diabolical fashion, punish them for their own ambiguity toward him, for their willfulness, for their involvement in the rebel cause, and just for being alive.

  The Queen’s Yard looked more derelict than most, as if some blight had descended upon the grounds. Gert’s tiny orchard lay in ruin, with but one apple tree; her garden was a mound of clotted earth, her front porch a pile of broken sticks, without hammocks and chairs. I entered Gert’s with much trepidation, found Clara in the parlor, smoking a pipe all by herself. She did not even glance up at me. Her legs were crossed.

  She was reading Aeschylus, out of my library, the library I’d left behind.

  She turned the page and condescended to notice me.

  “Well,” said she, “Gert’s lost son, is it not? And in the flesh.”

  “Clara, I never ceased to dream of you…and the time when you visited me in André’s jail. Did you forget?”

  Suddenly she was all a shiver and could not hold the book in her hands.

  “Oh, you men, you marvelous men, to think that my body gives you the right of possession…I do remember. ’T was like a sweet tooth. I wanted to make love to a certain Johnny who was about to be hanged. And I might have loved you for ever and ever had you not cheated the hangman—why have you waited so long? You go to balls with the English, you live in a traitor’s house, and it’s Gert who has to come begging for the bad boy. Who in hell do ye think got you out of that prison ship? She’d gone to Clinton, gone to André, and she went to Arnold.”

  “I am a lost son. Gertrude went to Benedict Arnold?”

  “On her knees.”

  “I will soon be as mad as Orestes, that prince in your precious book who kills his mother…she had no right to grovel before Arnold and discuss my life.”

  “Pride doth not eat the lion, but the lion cub. She should have left you to rot.”

  “And rob you of your bliss? I might yet have a gallows built for me.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I wouldn’t have much use for a man who’s been condemned twice.”

  I went to shake her, but she had a cutlass under her seat, and she struck me with the flat of her blade. I fell to the floor, and when I dove for her ankles, she struck me on the back. I crouched there, trying to surmise the lay of the land.

  Clara loomed over me with the cutlass. “I’ll kill you one day, Johnny. I promise.”

  “Darling,” I said from my perch on the floor, “Prince Paul swears you danced for me. At the edge of Little Africa—danced every day.”

  She did not lower the sword. “Are you wheedlin’, John? Begging for your life? Gawd, how skinny you are. It could make a person cry. Paul had no right to swear such things. A girl would have to be a fool to dance on a dock for a man who was a mile away. Do I resemble that girl?”

  “Indeed,” I whispered, mindful of the cutlass. Clara could have lopped my head off in a flight of angry passion. I had to reroute her storm. And suddenly I too was a shiver—’t was the joy of seeing her after twenty months, watching her flesh breathe, staring at the jewels on her slippers, drinking in the aroma of her arms. Let the cutlass fall. I would risk it.

  I rose up right under the arc of her blade. Her very presence had emboldened me.

  A prison ship was a far better college than King’s—I’d lived on hopelessness and fetid soup, a dead man who could still imagine.

  “Darling, you came to that dock because I brought you there.”

  “How?” she asked. “With the little intelligencer inside your pants? Did your very own rooster start to crow?”

  I hit her, slapped her with a knuckle, while she held the cutlass. And then I cried.

  Call it exhaustion…and my proximity to Clara.

  “Mistress,” I said, “we did play such games if memory serves.” “Where?”

  “On my coverlet, when you were bald and I was but a beer boy.”

  The fight had gone out of her. “I cannot remember,” she said.

  “You were a mouse, frightened of the wind, but a willful mouse. No one could order you where to go. We’d lie abed, and you would complete my thoughts like a mind magician. I’d think of cake, and you would describe that cake to me.”

  “You did not think of cake, John. It was a kite you had, a kite that some mariner had brought to Gert from Arabia. The nuns would give it names—Zephyr, West Wind, Turtle Dove. But you named it Squall.”

  I bled for that kite—’t was larger than a man, and of a color I had never seen before, a blue not found in all the colonies, richer than cream, a brightness that could beggar the eye. One of Gert’s admirers ripped my kite in a drunken rage, ran it through. I was inconsolable.

  “Clara, you could summon my thoughts while they were fomenting inside my skull.”
/>   She smiled with the cutlass in her two hands.

  “I did dance for you on Paul’s dock…I could feel the rooster in your pants—my Johnny’s prick. It was the sweetest kind of longing. No man had ever dreamed of me that much.”

  I should have taken her in my arms, cutlass and all, but I could not kill the image of Anne plummeting into the marsh—that image stood between us like some kite with a razored edge.

  “Dearest,” I sang, “do you recall a woman who was in Gert’s employ whilst I was gone? Blond, she was. With fair skin. A sensitive creature. She went by the name of Mrs.—”

  “Anne Harding.” Clara’s nostrils quivered. A bulge appeared above her eye as she edged close. And for the first time with Clara I feared for my life.

  “THAT’S ENOUGH,” came a voice from Gertrude’s open door. My own mum had been spying on Clara and me.

  I ducked under Clara’s cutlass and wandered into the bedchamber with spots in my eyes as vivid as lion cubs. Gert was in an old peignoir she never would have worn around her admirers. Her arms stood out like sticks. She had lost the better part of her plumpness. And Peggy Arnold had called her stout! The Brits must have set an invisible barrier in front of Robinson Street—another of Clinton’s blockades. And my poor mother was under siege.

  I hugged Gert, and she did not resist.

  “Mother, I cannot remain on this island. I must kill a man.”

  “But I could have him killed for you.”

  “’Tis not the same thing…you shouldn’t have gone to Arnold. Now I am indebted to him. And that’s not a debt I care to pay.”

  “But he would have emptied Wallabout in your behalf. He told me so. He loves you, says you are the boldest of his boys.”

  “Mother, did you play vingt-et-un with him?”

  She almost laughed. “I might have. But I didn’t get the chance.”

  I saw no wood near the fireplace. I could feel the rawness in my mother’s bones. The Queen’s Yard was caught in a deep chill.

  “Mother, have you been allotted no fuel?”