by Jon Clinch
“Jacob.”
He waves her off, leaving the door ajar, and shuffles toward the stair.
She follows, pushing the door wide in a burst of light.
He half turns and squints into the sun, both revealed by it and reduced. “Do you remember what Harry said at the last?” he says. “He said that we were all one family. The two of you and Ebenezer and myself. Mother Scrooge and Freddy. All one. He was in the midst of doing me a kindness, you see, and those were the terms in which he explained his reasons.”
“What sort of kindness was it?” For although she still dreams of Harry each night and thinks of him every waking moment, she has heard no new report of his good character in ages, and she hungers for it.
“The nature of the kindness is of no account now. It is lost with him, and I must fend for myself.”
“If I could help you in his stead, I would.”
Marley laughs, a sad and shocking thing. “Can’t you see?” he says. “You feel that very same family impulse.”
She stands abashed.
“Harry was right.”
She weeps.
A little wind picks up and shuffles the scattered notes like leaves. One lodges itself beneath his bare foot and he stoops to retrieve it. “Let us help each other,” he says. And wordlessly, she acquiesces.
By and by the connection will do them both good. Jacob is too old and ill to be a credible suitor, and Fan is too heartbroken to be credibly sought. Months will pass, and Balfour’s words will become flesh as Jacob insinuates himself as part of the family. That old table for three—first Mother Scrooge, Fan, and Ebenezer, and then Mother Scrooge, Fan, and Freddy—will expand so often to four that they will give off borrowing the neighbor’s chair and buy one outright. Marley will pay the bill, of course. No one will think anything of it.
Thirty-Three
Marley has more good days than bad. So many good days, in fact, that the bad ones seem negligible, aberrant, perhaps even meaningless. He is half a century old now and he feels his age everywhere from time to time—in his bones and in his skin and in his liver. Perhaps, he tells himself when he is felled by one symptom or another, he has always felt this way and has just forgotten. No one can remember everything. Not even Jacob Marley.
The rash that blooms upon his torso and limbs is tolerable for the most part. Pink and flat and painless, it is mainly a private annoyance that he can hide beneath his clothing, particularly during the cooler seasons. Only when it invades the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands does it present difficulty, and then chiefly when it erupts into warts and pustules. The sores upon his feet pain him and hinder his movement, bending his gait into a hesitant limp that he hopes is not too noticeable. Those upon his palms are a shade more troublesome, for they make him reluctant to shake hands upon the closing of a business deal. That sets an unfortunate tone. He takes to wearing gloves in public, although his wounds’ persistent weeping means that he must don a fresh pair several times a day. They prove to be more dressing than dress.
The doctor counsels mercury and patience. He is a grave old man, an expert at every kind of collapse and decay, and upon completing a thorough examination he prescribes a double dose of the medicine—both a pill and a topical salve. “A night with Venus,” he says with a little twinkle in his eye, “and a lifetime with Mercury.”
“A lifetime, is it?” asks Marley.
“This is a treatment, not a cure.”
“But I will live.”
“You will live, and the syphilis will live as well. In the end, you shall go to the grave together.”
“If you mean that as a comfort…”
“I am not in the business of comfort, Mr. Marley. I am in the business of medicine.”
“Then I was misled. I understood you to be in the business of cures.”
The doctor proceeds undaunted. “We shall need to wait and watch, of course. The symptoms may diminish for a time. Vision troubles, or pain in the joints, or loss of weight may suggest that the disease has gotten its second wind and is progressing. You can expect fevers, night sweats, a sore throat.”
“I don’t expect them. I have them.”
“They may pass.”
“I may pass,” says Marley.
“You shall,” says the doctor. “But in the meantime, cheer up. Unlike many of my patients, you’re still upright.”
* * *
There is upright and there is upright, and Marley finds himself pressing toward both. It is something of a surprise.
The handicaps that his condition has set before his various business activities, frustrating at first, have enforced upon him a slower and more thoughtful pace. He divides his time more or less equally between his bed and his workshop and his previously underutilized office at Scrooge & Marley. Scrooge, growing more accustomed to his presence, begins to think of him more as partner than adversary. Oh, he still chisels away at the man’s private fortune whenever he can, but he takes significantly less pleasure in it. He wonders now and then if his partner is playing some new game, working some new angle. Marley has told him a little about his condition, no more than is required to explain his various shortcomings and absences, and as a result Scrooge, not ordinarily given to pity, feels a tenderness toward the old felon. Perhaps, he thinks, the disease has softened his mind.
Back at home, Marley turns his artistic gifts toward a new avenue. He has taken his talents as far as he can in the area of counterfeiting—there is nothing he cannot do by way of forgery, and there is even less that he desires to do these days—and so in periods when his rash subsides and the tender skin of his hands permits, he takes up the delicate and deceitful art of trompe l’oeil. It suits him perfectly. Before long the apron hanging on a peg inside the door is not an apron at all, but a painting of one. The brushes and scrapers hung upon the walls are not brushes and scrapers, but their perfect likenesses. He even decorates the workbench itself, adding reflective spills of varnish and curly wisps of torn paper and artfully scattered pencil shavings, their every curve and shadow painstakingly executed in oil.
1830–1832
Thirty-Four
Marley doesn’t give much thought to his illness anymore, for over the years his symptoms have faded and gone largely to rest. Perhaps he is free of it, he thinks. Perhaps the doctor was wrong about its course. Perhaps some quality of his constitution has let him fight off the wretched disease entirely, while less robust individuals—poor Madeline, for example, may God rest her immortal soul—are doomed by their weakness to succumb.
Regardless, he continues the mercury treatments. He keeps up his modified habits, too. Most days he is in the office, keeping a patient eye on his accounts and a cautious eye on his partner. His holdings are still vast, sufficient to see him to the end of this life many times over, and although he luxuriates in the comfort of it all he pities his younger self for the price he paid in making it possible. He regrets the self-absorption and the cruelty and the blindness to the needs of others. Why, these days just having a quiet supper opposite that delightful young Freddy Balfour—Fred, he must remember, for the boy is all of sixteen years old now, nearly a man, and putting away childish things—just dining with the lad gives him happiness beyond imagining. The younger Jacob Marley, the Jacob Marley who had no pleasures beyond those of the countinghouse and the knocking-shop, never knew such ordinary joys.
Sundays and afternoons and early evenings when the light is good he confines himself to his workshop, where he paints. He has turned his attention from trompe l’oeil to still life and at last to portraiture—he favors the faces of strangers he has passed on the streets and in the lanes, unknowable individuals who seem made entirely of secrets—and although he is dissatisfied with his efforts thus far he believes that he has promise. It is better to fail at a difficult thing than to succeed at the commonplace again and again.
* * *
Without once consulting his partner, Scrooge brings on a clerk. There was a time when such an action would
have been unthinkable—the expense of it alone, never mind the audacity—but Marley raises no objection. He actually rather pities the fellow, this Bob Cratchit with his long face and his pinched nose and his air of a wretchedness beyond his years.
He is young, this Cratchit, terribly and pitiably so, as young as Marley and Scrooge were when they came of age and joined their fortunes together. But Cratchit has none of the nerve, none of the ambition, none of the drive that let them make something out of their partnership. He is quite good with calculations and has a fair tolerance for long hours, yet he brings to his work not a trace of the single-mindedness that made Scrooge Scrooge from the very beginning, not a particle of the imagination that made Marley Marley. There is, by contrast, an airiness about him, a lack of weight. If he were a ship he would be rudderless and light in the hold, doomed to be blown this way and that across an unforgiving sea. Marley foresees a family in his future, a suffering wife and hungry children, and he pities them their association.
He makes various charcoal studies of him, rough attempts to capture his gloomy look or his collapsing physique or his defeated bearing. He would get him entire if he could, bring him home and confine him in his workshop and execute his likeness down to the atom, for the man provokes within his breast unbridled curiosity and even sympathy. He no doubt possesses secrets and woes to which Marley would not dare seek access. So he watches him daily, safe behind the screen of his own busyness, and he speaks to him no more than is required, and he wonders about him as he has begun to wonder about the rest of mankind. Mysteries all.
He makes no effort to capture him in paint, however, for he has turned his attention to a different subject—one closer to his heart and better known to his eye, although mysteries still remain. Mysteries upon mysteries, in fact, for the years that he has spent in proximity to this individual have served only to compound the puzzles of personality and history and heart.
After six months, brushstroke by brushstroke, error by error, correction by correction, he is satisfied with the portrait. He is very nearly proud of it, and there are few things in his life that he is proud of now. As days and weeks go by the likeness lives on in his workshop, set upon a shelf where the light is good, but he will be damned if it does not cry out for something more. And so he opens his old cabinets and sharpens his old tools and returns to the old arts upon which he built his fortune.
He constructs a frame, an ornate thing carved of elm and beechwood. He perfects it first and then he brutalizes it, filing down its sharp edges and drilling wormholes in it with a brace and bit and abusing its full pristine expanse with a length of chain taken from one of his strongboxes. When he is satisfied he gilds it and rubs away the gilding in patches and gilds it all over again with materials of a slightly different shade. More battering with the chain and a quick dousing with some thinned black paint and at last a handful of powdered graphite burnished in with a ragged cloth, and it looks one hundred years old or more, an object stored in some attic or warehouse, the forgotten object of long neglect. It is a thing of softly gleaming beauty.
Into it he mounts the portrait. The completed work is too heavy to be returned to the shelf where the plain stretched canvas once stood, and so he leans it against the wall in a dim corner. There it will stand until he is ready to introduce it to the world beyond his workshop. A thousand other objects have made that transition prior to this, certificates and correspondence and licenses and more, but they have all been things of duplicity and deceit. They were frauds, created for gain. This portrait, despite the false luxury of its framing, is different. Revealing it fully will require some preparation.
Thirty-Five
It is a warm spring afternoon in London, just about suppertime, and no one would recognize Inspector Bucket or Mr. Nemo or any of Jacob Marley’s other public personae in the gentleman who now makes his leisurely way along the streets. Those men kept to the shadows, strode with desperation, cloaked themselves more often than not in anonymous rags. Not Marley, not anymore, for he is well-fixed and will not live forever. Yet he has survived. He has survived his encounters with Professor Drabb and Ebenezer Scrooge and Harry Balfour and, thus far, syphilis. He has set aside the weary habits of greed and acquisition, and substituted in their place something more humane. And he is at this very moment on his way to dine with a woman who, if not the love of his life, is at least a refuge from the worst of its torments. He can almost forget that he once paid for the murder of her husband. But that was long ago. Those were other times. He has been reborn into himself.
Gathered about the table, the four of them make a homely little family, perhaps even more comfortable than the same gathering would have been with Balfour in his rightful place instead of Marley. Marley provides no friction, after all, because he has no standing beyond that of a guest; he has no authority to exercise and no role to play. It hardly matters that he pays the rent and keeps the larder stocked. Given sufficient time and familiarity, particulars such as these may be reduced to nothing.
Fred’s appetite has grown as rapidly as the rest of him, and their dinner has barely begun when he calls on Marley to pass the beets around again, please. Marley accedes, and as he hands off the bowl Mother Scrooge spies an unlikely stain upon his otherwise characteristically pristine cuff.
“Is that coal dust?” she asks. “What would you be doing messing about with coal at this time of year, Mr. Marley?”
He stretches out his arm, studies the spot.
Mother Scrooge flicks at it with her napkin, but that only smears it.
He winces, draws the spot nearer to his nose, gives an inquisitive sniff. “It would seem not to be coal,” he says.
“What, then?”
He shrugs and smiles a coy smile and lowers his hand into his lap as if hiding the stain might end the discussion.
“Are you letting yourself go, Mr. Marley?”
“Never!”
“I believe that you might be.”
Fan speaks up. “It’s only a mark, Mother.”
“He’s letting himself go, he is.”
“Honestly,” says Marley, “I suppose it’s most likely graphite.”
“What?” says Mother Scrooge.
Fred comes up for air, calling for more mutton.
“Graphite,” says Marley, passing the platter. “Most likely.”
“Whatever it is, it’s got under your nails as well,” remarks the newly observant Mother Scrooge.
“I’ve been working on a little project,” he says.
“You’ve been failing to take care of yourself. You require looking after.”
“Mother.”
“If you won’t—”
“Mother.”
“It’s nothing, really,” says Marley. “A little artwork with which I’ve been amusing myself. I must have gotten distracted.”
“I didn’t know you had an artistic bent,” says Fan.
And thus is the bait taken.
“Ever since childhood,” he says.
“You must show us, one day.”
“Perhaps I shall.”
* * *
Exactly how long has she known him? All her life, it seems. He was there almost half a century ago, when she arrived at that dreadful boarding school to collect her brother. She was only a child then, sent by her father in the company of a gray-faced and taciturn driver, but Marley made an impression upon her. She remembers him extracting from Ebenezer a promise of regular correspondence—“Be sure I hear from you on the first of every month!” he said—although he did not look like the sentimental type. Perhaps, trapped in the clutches of Professor Drabb, the poor boy was simply starving for human kindness. A monthly note from someone, anyone, even dull old Ebenezer, could work wonders.
She did not know then and she does not know now that each of her brother’s notes would include an additional note, a commercially negotiable one, in payment against a fictional debt. Marley kept the boy impoverished thereby but also kept him close, and when their schooling
was finished and the false debt repaid their real work began.
From that day forward he was a fixture in her brother’s life and generally nothing more than that, an unremarkable thing as ordinary as a coat hook or a gas lamp. They had moments, yes, but those moments were fleeting and ill-fated, because in any sort of relation that they might conceivably pursue he would forever wield the powers of age and masculinity and wealth, leaving her to fall back upon the one power she retained, which was that of withholding. Everything changed at the bottom of the stairway. She quit being the object of his pity. She took strength in his weakness. She understood that perhaps—perhaps—he possessed a heart after all.
And now they find themselves here once more, at the bottom of that same stairway.
The last of the day’s light is dying as they go upward. The house is quiet, dead, with the wine merchants closed up and the rest of the tenants entirely mythical. Fan has never set foot beyond the foyer, and as they proceed down the hall the presence of those names on door after locked door—Plummer & Snagsby, Barnacle & Sons, Bildad & Peleg—strikes her as surpassingly queer. The rooms behind them might as well be prison cells as places of business. They could be magical chambers built to confine an army of ghosts.
“I thought you lived here all alone,” she says.
“Oh, I do,” says Marley. “These other fellows conduct their business during the day, when I am busy conspiring with your brother. It’s been years since I’ve seen a single one of them.”
“I had no idea,” says she. “This grand old house. I just thought…”
“It’s not so grand,” says Marley. “Quite far from it, really.”
“Large, then.”
“It is that. Large enough for the whole lot of us. And as long as these fellows pay their rent, we mind our own affairs.”