Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  “Where did he go?” asked Robert.

  She hesitated, and then said, “Cincinnati.”

  “Do you know when he will return?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” replied Mrs. Fitch.

  The brevity and vagueness of her replies struck me as odd. But I was nine, and there were still many perfectly ordinary aspects of adult life that I didn’t understand, so I shrugged off this little piece of strangeness that came in the midst of the great strangeness of life without my mother. My father had been to Cincinnati before.

  VI

  THE NEXT DAY, THE RAIN MADE a slate-colored stream along the curb and beat the flowers in the garden until their stems lay flat. Mrs. Fitch said she hoped we wouldn’t mind missing a few more days of school, and she asked us to occupy ourselves in the house and to keep close to it while she went out. She left us in the charge of Christina and took a hack uptown and did not return until that evening after supper.

  When she came back, she asked us to meet her in the parlor. She smiled at us. She took Lewis in her lap and stroked his hair. She looked around at us and beyond us, and it seemed several times as though she were about to speak but couldn’t find the words.

  “I’ve always liked this room,” she said finally. “Of all the rooms in all the houses where our sewing circle has gathered, this is the most pleasant. And you children were always good to all of us silly, sick old ladies, and if someone gave you a little present you thanked us, and if we gave you advice, whether it was wise or not, you listened, and if you were scolded unjustly you took our infirmity into account and did not resent it. You were a credit to your mother. You were a joy to her. She often told me so. You know I loved her. I always liked your father, too, with his gentle humor and kindness.” She paused, squinting. With a sigh, she pushed on: “Your grandfather I regard as a great man, and I am not alone in this. In short—forgive me—in short, you … you are well-brought-up children from a fine family, and wherever you go you may carry your name with pride. And—oh, mercy—mercy.” She winced. “Forgive me, children. You have been through so much, and you have been so strong, and it grieves me to tell you that you must bear an even greater burden. Your father has passed on. Oh, mercy. Your father, too—it happened quickly, he took ill in Cincinnati, he took ill with a fever—he was weakened by his grief and he died quickly, without time to make arrangements for you, but he sent you his love, he spoke your names, his last thoughts were of his children.”

  It was different from the way it had been around my mother’s deathbed. None of us wept. Even Lewis, sitting in Mrs. Fitch’s lap, looked bewildered rather than grief-stricken, and as for me, I felt as if all the blood had drained from my body, and I thought to myself: She is mistaken. She is a silly old woman, just as she says. She’s gotten it wrong.

  “But I cannot—I ask that you do not question me further about your father’s passing,” Mrs. Fitch continued—as if to fend off a volley of inquiries, though none of us had said a word—“for there is very little I know of a certainty right now, and I don’t want to sow confusion. Tonight you must pack, for tomorrow you are moving uptown to your grandfather’s house.”

  Mrs. Fitch led us on a search for trunks and carpetbags and saw to it that we included our winter clothes. Eventually, our grandfather would send for the contents of the house, she said. But much of it might be stored away and hard to reach, and so, if there was anything we needed, we should take it now.

  I helped Lewis pack his clothes and his toys, his presents from his mother, and his souvenirs, including his lucky rock, which at first he had me put in a box but which he decided at last to keep in his trouser pocket.

  That night, in the room I shared with Lewis, after we had said our prayers, I read to him by candlelight from Mr. Midshipman Easy by Frank’s favorite author, Captain Marryat. Frank had not lived to read this particular volume, which was published shortly after he died. In the first chapter there was a bluff joke about death and graves; neither of us commented on it. When Lewis’s eyelids began to sink, I snuffed out the candle and went to my own bed.

  The gas lamp outside threw a lozenge of light onto the ceiling. I heard street sounds of farewells, rolling carriage wheels, night-soil collectors scraping the pavement. In my dream, Mrs. Fitch came into the room and apologized to us; she had, in fact, been entirely mistaken about my father’s death. Then I woke up, and I could not fall back to sleep.

  Lewis was awake, too, and he asked if he could come into bed with me. I said yes, and we held each other. I spoke to Lewis about our grandfather’s house, reminding him of it, inviting him to speculate where we would sleep when we got there.

  After a silence, he asked me, “Where is Cincinnati?” and I told him that it was out west, in Ohio. Then he asked, “Is Papa in heaven?”

  “So we have been told,” I replied.

  “No, we haven’t,” Lewis corrected me.

  “Yes, Lewis. Mrs. Fitch said so.”

  “When did she say it?”

  “You were there when she said it.”

  “I don’t remember. I remember she said Papa was dead. When did she say he was in heaven, like Frank and Mama?”

  I thought for a while, and finally answered, “I forget. Of course Papa is in heaven.”

  Another few seconds went by, and then my brother asked me, “Will we die?”

  “Yes. That’s why we must be good, so that when we die we will go to heaven and be with Mama and Papa and Frank.”

  “Will we die soon?”

  “No. Not for many years.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. Believe me. Why, are you afraid?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It’s not like you to be afraid,” I said. “It’s you who frightens me, with your climbing, and picking fights with bigger boys, and playing with fire and knives, and running away so I can’t find you, and throwing rocks at pigs. Oh, it’s torture for me. How many times have I wished you were a coward.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lewis. “I’m sorry I frightened you. I’m sorry I was bad.”

  I felt his face, wet with tears, against mine. I said he was a wonderful boy and a great joy to me. He sobbed louder and held me tighter. “I’ll be good. I promise. And you promise me.”

  “That I’ll be good? What do you mean? I’m always good,” I said, to make him smile, though it was only the truth.

  I felt his head shaking. “Promise me you won’t die.”

  I stroked his hair. “I promise.” I kissed the top of his head, and his brow, and his cheeks, and his lips. “I promise. I promise.”

  A bright bar of light gradually appeared under the doorway, and there came a knock. I said, “We’re awake, come in,” and Robert entered, holding an astral lamp and followed by Edward. “Sleep in our room tonight,” said Edward. I held the lamp while they dragged our mattresses down the hall and into their room.

  We all lay there, quietly awake, until Robert suddenly spoke, saying, “We have to be faithful. We’ve got to stick together now,” and we all murmured our assent and pledged our loyalty to one another, making childish promises never again to quarrel.

  I had begun to doze when I was startled awake by the following idea: It could not be an accident that my father had taken ill so quickly after my mother died. My father and mother could not bear to be apart, and God had taken pity on them both by sending him a quick, easy death. If in His kindness to our parents God had treated us harshly, it was because he knew we could bear it. He was trying us, toughening us. He had some great purpose for us.

  In the sky, they were watching us, Mama and Papa, together and glad to see that their children were being kind to each other. I pictured them. They had beautiful white wings. The stars behind their heads seemed larger because they were so near.

  VII

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, WE WENT UPTOWN in a wagon from my grandfather’s store. The driver was a clerk in his employ—Horace—a young man so naturally cheerful that he could not help being
wrong for the occasion: with tight, garish clothes, and a short-brimmed hat at a rakish angle.

  Horace helped us load our trunks and bags. With self-conscious gallantry, he gave his hand to help Christina into the wagon.

  Mrs. Fitch embraced each of us in turn, making us promise to visit and to write. She said that she was confident—knowing how well our mother had raised us—that we would try to be light burdens to our grandfather and grandmother. We would remember that they, too, had just suffered a grievous blow in the death of our parents, and we should not wear them down with anxious questions. She said, finally, eyes brimming, “We are all pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth.”

  And we were off. From the back of the wagon, I saw Mrs. Fitch with her fist in her mouth, and then, for the last time, the house and this familiar tree and that familiar lamp, and Bowling Green Park, getting smaller until, with a turn of the wagon, it all disappeared. We came to the corner where Rebecca and I always used to separate on our walk home, and then we passed the hotel her father owned, where she lived and conversed with travelers from all over the world; I wondered if she had heard of what had happened since we last met, and the thought of her learning of it made my throat hurt. With a collective twist, like a great ribbon, a flock of pigeons simultaneously left the roof of a building nearby and reassembled on a ledge on the other side. We went by a long, dripping ice wagon, and men with pushcarts, Jews and Negroes and Irishmen chanting little rhymes about the freshness of their fish or their skill at sharpening knives. We were being swallowed up by the vast world. Our parents in heaven watched us and approved.

  Horace, perhaps nervous to be around people who had suffered a double bereavement, talked a great deal, not always appropriately; he flirted with Christina and praised our grandfather’s house and congratulated us on moving there (and Robert said quietly, “Only slaves and horses should be given classical names”). We went no great distance, but it took almost an hour, because the streets were crowded with carriages and horsecars and there were many delays. At last we came to the house I had visited usually on holidays, and I savored the sweet, fleeting impression that this was another, and that later that night I would return home to my parents; and instantly, in what was not my first experience of this age-old rhythm of bereavement, I paid for that pleasant instant of forgetfulness with the reminder of the truth: No, you won’t, never, never. My grandfather and grandmother came out to greet us, and with Horace’s help we stepped down from the wagon.

  My grandmother was a short, pink-faced, double-chinned woman, who always held her back very straight, as if to make up for her shortness. She smiled stiffly and sadly and lowered her head, first to me and then to Lewis, to receive our kisses. She gave us nothing more in the way of encouragement or welcome. She had just received a terrible blow, worse even than I knew, but there was more to it than that. She had never been demonstrative toward me or toward my brothers. Taking into account the formality of her class and generation, she was relatively natural with my father, but as a grandmother she was chilly, and she had always struck me as rather selfish.

  My grandfather’s manners were even stiffer, but his affections had a broader scope, and I knew that he did not view me merely as a difficulty thrust on him by my parents’ death. When we spoke, although we were formal, we were not impersonal.

  He embraced me in his usual bewildered way, as if he had never quite understood the purpose of embraces but did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings by withholding them. Then he put his hands gently on my shoulders—a sincerer gesture—to hold me at the right distance to focus on my face and my eyes, and he welcomed me. He shook hands gravely in turn with Robert, Edward, and Lewis. He told us that the servants would show us our rooms, and that we should let them know that we were not loafers but serious, hardworking people, by helping them bring up our bags and trunks.

  So we helped bring our belongings into our rooms, which were on the second floor, not far from the big dining room where we met on holidays. Robert and Edward were in the guest bedroom, and Lewis and Christina and I in another. From its window I could see a chestnut tree, a weeping willow, a fountain, a pool, and a garden. The linen on my bed was fresh and crisp. The rooms were more numerous and larger than we were used to; the chairs were covered with silk instead of chintz; we could go down to the kitchen at any time and get a drink with ice in it. Once we had helped to bring our luggage in, we had no work to do, for the help carried all the wood and water and did all the other work that we usually did at home. We were sad, but we were comfortable.

  IT SEEMED THAT MY GRANDMOTHER HAD DECIDED to befriend me the best way she knew how, by having me accompany her as she went about her little routines and self-assigned chores. She did not have to cook or clean in any serious way, but she took upon herself the tasks she said could not be entrusted to the help, which were really the ones she simply liked to do.

  So, while Christina minded Lewis, we baked and polished the silver and sewed. We made full suits of clothing from fabrics we selected—materials my grandmother possessed in abundance, drawers and drawers full of rich, heavy brocades and broadcloths, damask, jaconet, and fustians. There was a great deal of lace, which she showed me with guilty pride, explaining the astonishing and basically unjustifiable amount of work that had gone into the making of each piece, years of skilled labor concentrated in that one drawer. Collecting these fabrics was her main vice.

  Because women in evangelical circles were supposed to shun vain frippery, an indulgence of this sort needed an excuse. My grandmother’s was that she belonged to her church’s Dorcas Society, which made clothes for the poor. (I did not ask whether she put lace and damask into these clothes, and I still don’t know.) Dorcas, said my grandmother, was a Christian woman in olden times who was so good that Peter raised her from the dead.

  This got me to thinking, and after a few more minutes of sewing, I asked my grandmother the name of the illness of which my father had died.

  She grew still for a moment and answered tersely, “It was fever. Nothing more specific is known.” A little later, she looked up again from her needle and added, “Several others in the hotel had gotten it, and the vapors from—from his person—were thought to be dangerous, and so they hurried to get him in the ground. That is why you did not go to his funeral.”

  “Where is he buried?”

  “He was buried there.”

  We went on sewing in silence. We were in a drawing room on the second floor, at the back of the house. From the window I could see the lawn and garden, and Lewis with Christina and a small white dog. After another minute, I asked, “Will he be brought home?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly.

  “When?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Will he be buried beside my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  I heard Lewis cough, I heard the dog bark. I looked out the window again. A bird left the windowsill with a flutter and a swoop. Farther away, the dog dropped something at Lewis’s feet, and Lewis, with a stick, was poking whatever had been dropped. I asked, “Who was with him when he died?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did any others in the hotel die of the fever?”

  “No.”

  We kept dipping our needles into the fabric. The bird came back. I heard it cooing. I made more stitches, and asked, “Did the fever spread? Beyond the hotel?”

  “I believe it was successfully contained.”

  I thought more and sewed more, and finally asked, “Was it in the newspapers?”

  “Stop it, I won’t have it,” cried my grandmother. It was so unexpected that for a moment I thought she might be speaking to a bird at the window or a servant in the next room. “Did your mother never speak to you about asking questions?”

  I didn’t like to hear anything that could be interpreted as a criticism of my mother. “My mother worked hard to teach me good manners.”

  A little more softly, she agreed, “Of course she did. Your mother was a good woman
, and you are a well-behaved child. But you are being thoughtless. Remember that your father was my son, and these questions pain me.”

  When we went to church, my grandparents wouldn’t let us speak to anyone.

  Doctors visited the house to examine us—all of us. We did not know why, and I did not question it, assuming that my grandfather wished to know the condition of the new members of the household and was wealthy enough to pay doctors just to determine exactly how healthy we were. Dr. Boyle came first. Then there was a Frenchman, who used a stethoscope, a novelty in those days. It came in a felt-lined wooden carrying case and was assembled from pieces, like a clarinet. We were next seen, in turn, by a Thomsonian, a physiobotanist, and a homeopath. The homeopath gave us tiny white pills. Lewis and I both still suffered from a dry cough, which all of the physicians, whatever their system, considered to be highly significant.

  We were not told the results of these observations, but a few times I heard them agreeing sagely that Lewis and I each possessed “a tubercular diathesis.” I knew what this meant. It was supposed back then, before Dr. Koch, that there was a consumptive type—refined, sensitive, and attractive. Beauty of a certain kind was a seal of doom.

  A few weeks after the last of the doctors, a servant told me to go to my grandfather’s study. When I got there, he smiled at me, but he looked troubled, and I thought that Lewis must have broken something expensive or uttered a sentiment intolerable even in a boy of seven, and my grandmother had asked that I be spoken to about him. Dust motes rose and drifted as my grandfather moved letters and ledgers off a chair for me to sit. He asked how I was feeling. I said very well. “Good,” he said. I asked the same of him, and he replied that he was in good health for a man his age.

  Christina wanted me to use my influence to get her a room of her own. She had had her own room in Bowling Green and didn’t see why she should have to sleep with the children in a much larger house, and she had insisted that I bring the subject up with my grandfather the next time I spoke to him. I had felt timid about passing on this request, but now I was glad to have something to say to delay whatever unpleasant subject he was about to broach.