Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  After the meal, my uncle told Titus to meet him on the porch. As we were helping with the dishes, we heard my uncle speaking, each word accompanied by a muffled blow and a cry of pain. “Children.” Thwack. “Will.” Thwack. “Learn.” Thwack. “To.” Thwack. “Listen.” Thwack. “To.” Thwack. “Their.” Thwack. “Elders.” Thwack. As though she were imparting a great secret, Evangeline told us that Titus was being whipped. When I asked why, she said she didn’t know.

  Horace and the hands slept on the other side of the house. My aunt and uncle slept in a small bedroom downstairs. The children slept in the loft, a room with a big floor but low, slanting ceilings. The whole house was really very small. Sounds carried easily in it, and we could always hear the rhythmic creak of the bed when my aunt was fulfilling her marital obligations, but we were spared this on our first night.

  When we were up in the loft, I saw the trunks that Sam and Pat had brought up there after supper. They contained things that country children might never have seen. “See what we’ve brought from New York,” I said, and, gratifyingly, my cousins crowded around a trunk. I spoke more freely with my aunt and uncle gone. I showed them the illustrations in Buffon’s Natural History, my dress shoes, my seashell collection. I told them that, each day on the piers in New York City, barges many times larger than this house unloaded great mountains of oysters. I showed them a lace collar my grandmother had given me. I remarked on a difference between New York City and Livy. In Livy, from what I’d heard, you went to Colonel Ashton’s store for everything. But in New York City, a five-block district was devoted just to the sale of carpets, and another neighborhood to ropes and other nautical things, and another to butchering, and another to carriages. I told them about Moving Day. In New York City, most people rented their homes, and the leases ended on the same day, and every first of May the streets were clogged with wagons heaped with people’s belongings. But my grandfather owned our house. We had never moved, until recently.

  As I spoke I thought of Rebecca, my schoolmate, who had overawed me with her experiences of mountains, racetracks, and panoramas. As Rebecca was to me, I was to my cousins. I had seen more of the world. I had an advantage, and I could subdue them, as Rebecca had subdued me. This could help reconcile me to the small house, the bad food, the loutish manners, and whatever other disappointments awaited me here.

  Evangeline, curiously turning an oyster shell and making parts of it glisten in the candlelight, asked, “Did you bring any oysters with meat in them?”

  Agnes said, “Don’t be silly, Evangeline. Oysters would not keep on such a long journey.” She looked at me with a tiny smile, that we might sigh together over Evangeline’s incorrigible ignorance.

  I was going to do just that—I should have—but then I had a bright idea. “Actually, oysters can be dried. Some people like them that way,” and I added airily: “I wish I had thought to bring some.” Evangeline’s expression rebuked Agnes—see, her question had not been stupid!—and Agnes’s face fell, and I had a tiny suspicion that I had just made an error.

  “What a fancy name you have, Arabella,” said Agnes. “That’s not a Bible name, is it?”

  “It’s a name in my grandfather’s family,” I said.

  “It sounds Spanish. It makes me think of a fine Spanish lady who wears black lace and has servants.”

  “It’s English, I guess. The ship that first brought the Puritans to Massachusetts was the Arbella.”

  “Aren’t you mistaken, Arabella?” Agnes asked as if she had caught me being naughty and was putting my little crime to me delicately.

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “If you think a little more, won’t it come to mind that the ship that brought the Puritans to America was the Mayflower?”

  My other cousins were watching us with a sudden alertness which told me that it was dangerous to disagree with Agnes, but I could not, like Horace, efface myself to the point of saying the opposite of what I believed. “You’re right, Agnes. The Mayflower came before the Arbella. But my grandfather always used to remind us that the Pilgrims and the Puritans were not the same. The Pilgrims came on the Mayflower with Miles Standish. The Puritans came on the Arbella with James Winthrop. My grandfather used to tell us that every Thanksgiving. He always mentioned the ship, because of my name.”

  I threw in my grandfather and Thanksgiving as a sop to Agnes’s pride. I didn’t know all this just because I had received a better education. I knew it for these special, personal, accidental reasons.

  Agnes asked, “Are you sure, Arabella?”

  “So I was told.”

  “Is it likely, Arabella, that the Puritans, who set such store on simplicity, came on a boat with so fancy a name? How are we to explain that?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “Could the explanation be that you did not hear correctly?”

  Did she think she could bully me into saying there was no difference between Pilgrims and Puritans? Into the silence came Matthew’s derisive comment: “She’s talking about her own darn name, Agnes. How dumb would she have to be to be wrong about her own name?” Agnes didn’t answer, and he drove the point home: “Well, I guess you don’t know everything after all, do you, Agnes.”

  WE KNELT BESIDE OUR BEDS. They seemed to be waiting for me to start. I said the Prayer of Agur, which my mother had taught me long ago. I prayed to be given what I needed but not more than was good for my character.

  Agnes’s prayer, which began after mine, was very long and specific. She asked that Jesus lead Mr. Cooper and Mr. Talbot away from drink and ease Mrs. Slocum’s rheumatism; console Mr. and Mrs. Rawley for the death of their son by drowning last year; and that Mrs. Lyall, the sick widow, recover or be granted an easy passage to the arms of the Lord; that Josh Rowen leave off swearing; that the stony hearts of Henry Rowen, Mark Taylor, Becky Forrest, and twenty others she named, including her dear cousins Lewis and Arabella, be softened into such a consistency as would enable us to receive the Holy Spirit and the believer’s baptism; that the winter would not be too hard and the vegetables not run out early and the livestock not perish until the best time to slaughter them and that the meat would not spoil; that the cows keep giving good fat milk for a few more weeks, and come spring the maple sap be plentiful and sweet; that Sam and Pat be converted from popish idolatry; that the people of New York City have money again; that my grandfather’s business survive and he be furthered in his great work; that the Lord guide the counsels of President Van Buren and smite the enemies of the United States.

  Was that how one prayed here? Must I learn to pray like that? To my relief, Evangeline’s prayers were short and the boys’ were piggish grunts. I thanked Agnes for mentioning Lewis and me. I tried to make a peace offering of my thanks. I knew I had offended her.

  X

  LEWIS AND I SLEPT THROUGH the rooster’s crow. My aunt pulled us to our feet, and we piled on clothes, and the crimes that are rumored to occur on farms were actually perpetrated: hens were distracted with corn and robbed of their eggs, cows were milked, hay was forked, pigs were swilled, all before our breakfast of watery oatmeal. Only the milk was thick and good. We were each allowed one spoonful of molasses.

  At breakfast, Lewis announced that Horace would be staying on as a hired hand.

  “Am I?” said Horace.

  “Horace, you like farming,” said Lewis. “You told me you did.”

  “Lewis, you’re a fine, brave boy and you’re going to be all right. You’ve got a new family now. You’ve got your sister, and four cousins, and an uncle and an aunt who will be like a ma and a pa to you. You can write me letters, and I’ll write you back.”

  “I don’t want any letter from you. I hate you.” He was crying now.

  “Hush, Lewis,” said my aunt.

  Horace picked him up. Lewis wrapped his arms around Horace’s neck. “Horace, don’t go. Don’t go, Horace. Don’t go.”

  My uncle said, “That’s enough, Lewis. Let go,” but he wouldn’t, until m
y aunt peeled him off Horace and held him as he tried to twist away. The hands laughed. Horace looked sad. My aunt asked Titus to fetch a switch. Lewis sat, waiting sullenly, until Titus came back with a hard stick about the diameter of my index finger.

  “Let me do it,” I said. “I always did it at home.”

  My aunt looked at my uncle and then shook her head, and she gave him eight strokes on the bottom: “This. Is. To. Teach. You. How. To. Obey.”

  She told me later she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame my mother for letting me punish my little brother. She had heard of such things in large families where the eldest children were almost grown, but she didn’t approve of it, and she was happy to take this burden off my shoulders.

  LEWIS WENT UP IN THE LOFT SO as not to see Horace go, but he seemed to recover later, and he tagged along when the men and the boys went out to the woods with the felling saw.

  The house was quiet. I showed my aunt and Agnes and Evangeline some presents my grandmother had given me to give them, the factory-made buttons, ribbons, and pins that country women craved as much as did any naked islander who might swim out to meet Captain Cook. I showed them the miniature of my mother. My aunt sighed: it was just as she remembered her sister. Agnes said, “Oh, it is so lovely. Some would charge her with vanity for putting a man to the trouble of painting it, but what a providence to have it now. I’m sure Providence made her do it, even if it struck people as vain at the time.”

  I supposed these insinuations about my mother were retribution for correcting Agnes about oysters and the Mayflower and the Arbella. “My mama was pretty before illness took away her beauty, but she wasn’t vain. Nobody said that. My papa had one of these made of himself, too, for her to carry. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “Oh my,” said Evangeline, as if I’d said something shocking.

  “Dear Evangeline, please do remember your promise,” said Agnes enigmatically.

  My aunt cleaned and baked and had us fetch this and mix that, but mainly asked that we stay near so that she could hear the talk. Agnes and Evangeline told me about life in Livy. I told them about New York City.

  Evangeline was amazed at everything, yet somehow not very interested. Agnes made many comments, of four general types. First, she supposed that some people would disapprove of the waste, frivolousness, or impiety shown by my report of city life. Second, she hoped that the country was not going to bore me. Third, whenever I mentioned my mother, she’d give me a big helping of false pity. Fourth, the next time I spoke of my father her hand flew to her mouth, and my aunt gave her a stern look.

  At last there came a time that afternoon when I mentioned my grandfather’s warehouse. I remember that, before I spoke the words, I knew they would make something bad happen. I spoke against my better judgment. Lewis had been exaggerating when he said he went up there all the time, I said. He’d only been up there once. But it really was the tallest building in New York City, and he really had dropped a rock from it and accidentally killed a pig that was walking below.

  My aunt wiped her hands with a cloth. “Belle, come up with me.” I followed her to the loft. She sat on the edge of my low bed, her knees raised awkwardly high, as she invited me to sit beside her. The bulk of her, the moles and blemishes scattered across her face, the stench of lard and sweat emanating from her clothes repulsed me and I struggled not to show it. But more than anything I was frightened. I knew that she was about to tell me something terrible.

  “Someone should have told you; they promised me they would tell you. Until that man Horace stopped us in the wagon yesterday, we thought you were told. You can’t talk about your grandpa’s warehouse: you must never mention it again. You can’t keep saying your pa got a fever on a business trip to Cincinnati. You can’t because it ain’t true, and everybody knows what really happened. It was put in the newspapers, and folks know about it because your grandpa is talked of for his crusades against drink and slavery and Sabbath breaking, and I—foolishly, vainly, I bragged about my sister’s connection to him. And now you’re to be punished for my vanity, because folks know. Your pa took his own life. The way he did it was by jumping from the top of that warehouse. It was a terrible thing for him to do, and a terrible thing for you to have to hear, and for me to have to be the one to tell you—oh my Lord, how bitter this is for me.”

  She tried to embrace me, but I flinched and turned away.

  There was more. “He left a note,” my aunt said. “He asked forgiveness. He took the blame on himself—I don’t know who else he thought we’d blame—but since he left a note we know that he meant to do it. It was no accident: he jumped. We know it. Everybody knows it, so you have to.”

  She reached for me again. Again I jerked away from her. She said, “Belle, where are you going?” I did not know myself, nor can I report to you how it felt. I was not aware of being in myself, feeling myself, making decisions. It was a discovery to me that I was throwing on my coat and rushing down the ladder, past Agnes and Evangeline, out to the porch, down the steps, past the privy, the chicken shack, and the orchard, and across a gully by means of a ramshackle bridge made of two weathered gray planks with holes where knots had fallen out, and out into the brown fields that were full of stubble and decaying stumps.

  The sky was white. I ran until I looked back and the house was small. A little farther on, the ground rose, and I was in rolling country dotted with mounds of hay. The grade of the land fell again, and when I looked back there wasn’t any house. I was panting among rotten pumpkins. Collapsing, turning brown, they were oozing black juice, and I wondered why whoever had planted these pumpkins hadn’t come back to harvest them. I supposed he had killed himself. I heard a scratchy voice calling my name, but again I ran.

  She must have run, too, because she caught up with me. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Go away. You’re not my mother.”

  “Who said I was? Your mother’s in heaven. I’m your aunt.” She knelt and put her hands on my shoulders. She had hurt me and I wanted to hurt her. “You won’t do. You have a man’s face and a crooked back. I can’t stand to look at you.”

  I saw the pain wash across her gaunt features, followed by anger, and was simultaneously gratified and frightened. “I’m sorry for you,” she said steadily. “I don’t want to punish you when you’ve just had a bad shock, but you can’t talk that way to me.”

  I had taken a scary step away from the good girl I considered myself to be. A part of me wanted to fall sobbing onto her narrow bosom and be comforted. How many times I’ve wished I had—as I would have, if only she had waited a moment longer. But she tried to hurry it; like an impatient lover, she tried to pull me toward her; and I rebelled. “Leave me alone,” I said. She persisted. I spat in her face.

  She stared at me, dumbfounded. Then she released me, and one of her hands returned with a wallop on the jaw that made my head ring. She had swung wide, using her strength and weight, and with an empty look on her face she pulled her arm back and let loose a second blow, which knocked me to the ground.

  “No dinner and no supper,” she said, gasping. “You’ll spend the rest of the day upstairs, thinking about what you’ve done. Now get up and walk ahead,” she pointed. “That way. That’s home now.”

  I got up and walked where she pointed; my head throbbed, and I was shaking. There had been no punishments like this in Bowling Green. This was life from now on. I was astonished that things could have gone so wrong between us so quickly, and wished that the last few minutes could be undone. Buried beneath it all, coloring everything, was a vision of my father hurling himself down from the roof of my grandfather’s warehouse.

  “I blame my sister,” I heard her say from behind me. “She knew she was dying. Why didn’t she prepare you better? How could she have spoiled you so?”

  I turned to tell my aunt that she was wrong—that my mother had devoted her life to making me a welcome presence in the houses of my re
latives.

  “No sass,” said my aunt. “No sass from you.”

  IN THE LOFT, I THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER looking down upon me: Had she seen the slaps? Then she had seen me spit in my aunt’s face. What did she think of my aunt? What was her opinion of me?

  I looked out the window. I thought of crawling out on the roof and escaping—it wasn’t high. But where would I go? I decided to wait until everyone was asleep. I would take Lewis with me. We would bring food. We would walk to Rochester. We would beg at the farmhouses on the way, and I could get a position as a servant somewhere—I knew how to cook, clean, mend, and sew, and I had good manners, and I didn’t eat very much. When we had enough money, we’d take the canal back to Albany and the steamboat down to New York City, to my grandparents’ house, where they would be grateful to see that we were still alive, for by then they would have heard of our disappearance.

  I knew when they told Lewis about my father. I heard him shouting, “You’re lying! You’re a liar!” and I heard my aunt say, “Titus, get me a switch,” and a scuffle, probably Lewis running and being caught.

  It was his second switching in one day. He, too, was sent to bed without supper, and we weren’t allowed to speak to each other.

  After sundown, the others came up to the loft. They had been forbidden to speak to us. Matthew and Titus played with marbles, by candlelight, and said only things like “Lucky shot,” and “You cheated.”

  Then my aunt came in and told my cousins to leave. She sat down with us on the bed, saying, “We’ve made a bad start. There’s no excuse for the way you two have acted today, and I—and you made me lose my temper. But you’ve been punished, and I forgive you. And you have to forgive me, because we can’t go on this way.”

  I mumbled insincerely that I forgave her. She had us both kneel beside the bed with her and ask God to help us to be better children.