Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  I took the train to Albany and then to Rochester, and from Rochester I took a stagecoach south. In Patavium, I rented a gig and drove it myself to Melanchthon’s farm. I passed hilly pastures and wrinkled fields, and I was there. There was now a second farmhouse, forty yards from the old one.

  When I had last come here, it had been to leave Frank, and I had been pushed and pulled by the memories of Jeptha and my shame in the town. I didn’t feel that this time. That old Livy of regret and nostalgia was not a real place on earth anymore, but a place in my memory. All I could think of was that I was about to see my son.

  With mounting excitement, I brought the gig into the barn myself and wiped down the horse. When I walked out, I encountered the hired girl, a stranger to me, who took my portmanteau and went in to announce me. Anne, stout and gray-haired, pulled me into the house and embraced me: “I would never have asked you to come, but I’m glad you did.” Frank, she told me, was in town, at the livery stable, where he had been working since the end of Livy’s four-month school term, and she observed in a way that was neither doting nor judgmental, “Frank works hard when it puts money in his pocket.”

  She took me to Melanchthon, who sat in a wicker chair on the back porch, watching two yellow wasps drink from a puddle of cider. Half of his face drooped like a sack. “Melanchthon,” his wife said, “it’s Arabella! Arabella has come all the way from California to visit us!” He turned his face to me, pursing his wet lips asymmetrically, and Anne said that he was happy to see me. I kissed his damp brow, patted his shoulder. Shooing the wasps and wiping away the cider puddle, Anne told him in a cheerful voice that they would be having bread pudding with dinner. She gave him some good news about the weather and a field and a fence; when the porch door had closed behind us, she said that she had always known this might be the price of marrying a man already middle-aged, and that she had not really been taken by surprise.

  “Daniel and Susannah will eat with us,” she said, and sent the girl to tell them. “Do you still cook? Will you help me?” I said I would, and we worked in the kitchen, which had been improved since I had been here last. There were two cooking stoves, running water from a cistern, a big steel meat-grinder, and numerous wax-sealed glass jars in which seemingly every product of the farm had been jammed, jellied, potted, or pickled.

  In my letters, I had always maintained the pretense that my money was from my marriage to a banker (now deceased), but I assumed that Anne knew everything. I spoke generally of life in California, and she spoke about matters here.

  She chose her words carefully, and I knew that I was supposed to read between the lines. Susannah, whom I remembered as my little friend from my first years here, had married Daniel, a good fellow, who now ran the farm. Unfortunately—and I had best avoid the subject—Susannah had so far been unable to conceive, and probably this was why she doted on Frank. She loved Frank to idolatry, without understanding him at all, and it was painful to watch how hard she tried to bind him to her, since it was all in vain and done so badly. At every turn she opposed his wishes. “Frank is sharp as a tack,” Anne said, chopping walnuts with machinelike speed. “I don’t worry much about Frank. But Susannah will never make him into a farmer.”

  “If he’s sharp as a tack and he wants to go to the Pearson Academy, and I’m willing to pay for it, why won’t you let him go?”

  “Weren’t you listening? It’s not me. It’s Susannah. She won’t part with him. I take the blame for her.”

  I surmised that Anne had a weakness for her only daughter, and was afraid to make her angry.

  We worked a little more quietly, and I asked, “Does Susannah know about me?”

  After a few seconds she said, “Yes.”

  Another pause. “Well, I could use that, couldn’t I? I could threaten to tell him. You couldn’t, but I could.”

  “I see what you mean,” she said after a while, with a contemplative expression that, in her, stood for disapproval. “No, you can’t use that.”

  “It would be a bluff,” I assured her. “I would never tell.”

  Anne shook her head.

  We talked over other arguments that might be used to persuade Susannah, but it seemed clear enough that they had all been made already and had not moved her.

  At last, when the hired girl was lighting lamps, which made it seem suddenly darker outside, Frank came up the walk and I went out to greet him. He had his father’s dark eyes, long lashes, and wavy black hair. He reminded me of Charley, most of all, in his mature, self-possessed expression, which was all the more striking because he was quite small for his age. I could find nothing of myself in his face or form.

  The son of a parlor-house madam and a man hanged for murder, he strolled toward the house with his hands in his trouser pockets. He saw me, and for a moment I did not know whether I was going to run to embrace him or run away and hide, I so longed for his touch and feared his judgment. His brow knit. “Godmother?” he asked—he knew me from my pictures! I nodded. He smiled, which made me very happy, and I embraced him with less emotion than I felt and forced myself to release him long before I was ready. He returned my embrace politely, as one would expect from a boy his age who did not know that he was holding his mother for the first time since he was an infant.

  I said lamely, “It’s so good to see you after all these years,” thinking, as I had often on the way here, that very few of the methods of ingratiating myself to grown men would be effective on a boy.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” he answered mechanically. “You’re just like your pictures. I work at the hostler’s in Livy.” I opened my mouth to say that that was fascinating and I wanted to hear so much more about it, but he added, “I wash up after work there, but Anne makes me wash up again here. So—I’d better do it.”

  “By all means,” I said, hurting. “I’ll see you in a little while. We’ll have lots of time to talk. I’ve brought you presents.”

  We had supper, usually a simple meal, on the best tablecloth and the best plates, and along with Daniel and Susannah. The hired girl spoon-fed Melanchthon. A couple of times he contributed to the conversation, words that the others seemed to understand, though I could not.

  I was overdressed for any possible occasion on this farm—I had forgotten, I had miscalculated—and a few minutes of awed conversation were devoted to my clothes. I noticed that Susannah could not utter a word without bringing a look of disgust to Frank’s face, and that she feared and despised me—Susannah, whose flaxen hair I had combed on a hundred different days when her father’s house was my refuge from Aunt Agatha and Cousin Agnes. Now she was very stout, stouter than Anne, who was twenty years older. Her flaccid white arms shook like jelly, her face was as round as a pancake, and some minor ailment made her skin look red and bruised. She didn’t try to hide her feelings. She must have been dreading my return for years.

  After Frank went upstairs, and Daniel wheeled Melanchthon back to the porch, we drank cider and looked at the stars until I jerked my head toward a lit window behind us on the second floor. “Is that Frank’s room?”

  “That’s right,” said Anne. “You haven’t seen Daniel and Susannah’s house, have you, Arabella? Let’s walk there.” Susannah, grasping that we were about to talk about Frank, looked angry and scared, but she complied. Daniel took a lamp, and we walked on a hard dirt path through air that was sweet with honeysuckle and apple blossoms. Anne said, “Arabella, we never thanked you for your generous offer regarding the Pearson Academy,” giving me a cue to begin, but I didn’t wish to: I couldn’t see the others’ faces without a conspicuous effort, nor could Susannah see mine, and I planned to use many subtle effects. So I talked inconsequentially until we were in Susannah’s parlor and she had served us homemade sassafras tea and we had praised its flavor and discussed its tonic properties.

  I began by saying that whoever had raised Frank had done a wonderful job. “Was it you, Susannah? It looks to me like it was you.” She sullenly regarded her tea, but Anne and Dan
iel said I was right. “I knew it. Anyone could see what you mean to him.” She looked up with desperate hope. I had her heart in my hands. “It’s you he loves. He loves you the way a boy loves his mother.” I was glad that I had waited until I was where I could see her face, because I had been about to say that his habitual rudeness to her was clearly the rudeness that boys show to their mothers when it is time to cut the apron strings, and I saw from her expression that this would be much too subtle. She needed a very pure reassurance, and only I could give it to her, because I was his actual mother, dying for his love, and surely I wouldn’t say it unless it was true. I dwelled on the topic until she had the certainty of his love within her grasp. Then I handed her Frank’s letter and watched as she read it. “What he doesn’t know is that you’re the only one standing in his way.”

  There was more to my argument, there were all the reasons why going away to school was best for him and that it was what he wanted, and the unspoken fact that he must never know that his mother was a prostitute and his father a gambler. But the heart of it was the threat that if she didn’t let Frank go I’d tell him that she was the one keeping him here. He’d know that in a matter so important to him she had pretended one thing while doing the opposite, and he would never trust her again. After about an hour of this, Susannah, hating me more than ever, agreed to let Frank go; Daniel was holding her and comforting her, but it was plain that he was grateful to me.

  It was agreed that I would deliver Frank to the Pearson Academy myself. A few days later, we took the stage out of town.

  WE WERE SHY WITH EACH OTHER. On the stagecoach, our fellow passengers—a corn jobber with a storybook witch’s face, a handsome drummer, and a jowly sawmill owner smelling of peppermint—talked about the war, and asked me about California. Out the windows, the scenery jogged by, tame and orderly, the houses painted, the roads gravel or plank, the bridges covered. I told Frank how different it had looked when I came here the first time, as a girl. He nodded firmly, obviously not the least bit interested. The only thing about this road that mattered was that it was taking him where he wanted to go.

  Savoring each moment with my son, I made the journey last longer with two stops overnight in towns, and meals at the most expensive restaurants I could find. Once, at our hotel (where, to respect his privacy, I got him a separate but adjoining room, and he was amazed by my extravagance), he noticed a deck of cards I had used for a game of patience; and he invited me to play gin rummy, which Anne had taught him. Charley had told me to keep Frank away from cards, I remembered. With some misgivings, I shuffled the deck and we began.

  “Play well,” he said after a few minutes. “You’ll need to.”

  I lost. We played other card games, and backgammon and checkers. I remember how it felt, losing to Frank. There was motherly pride, there were memories of Charley, there was helplessness. Struggle was useless. It wasn’t personal. You were his food. In after years, I would think of these games whenever I heard that some little businessman had discovered that a new zoning ordinance was forcing him to sell his factory, and that Frank had come to him saying, “If you had sold out to me the first time I asked, you’d have gotten a better price.”

  At the Pearson Academy, I spent a few days making things smooth for him, buying him clothes and things for his room, imagining the day when I would tell him everything and he would love me.

  LXVI

  I RETURNED TO NEW YORK A DAY BEFORE I was to meet with Jeptha, and asked at my hotel if any messages had been left for me. The clerk gave me a letter, which I tore open where I stood.

  Dear Belle,

  Belle, my love, I’m about to make you angry, and I have to ask your forgiveness, because I have tricked you and lied to you. My father is not sick. It was never my plan to visit my family on this trip back east. It was my plan from the first to join in this fight which is the most important we are likely to see in our lifetimes, and certainly the only one that could have induced me to point a weapon at my fellow man. Ever since South Carolina seceded I’ve known there’d be a war. For months now my sermons have been thinly veiled recruiting speeches, and I couldn’t go on telling other men to enlist while I stayed safe and comfortable in San Francisco.

  You’ll say I should have told you. But how could I? I know you, Belle. You would have made it hell for both of us. If you had succeeded in changing my mind, it would have cost me my self-respect. In any case it would have been a desperate struggle. It would have spoiled the wonderful time we’ve had together these last few weeks, which have been the sweetest of my life.

  Edward has joined, too. We are both in the 71st Pennsylvania Regiment under the command of your old friend Colonel Baker. We are staying now at a place called Fort Schuyler, in New York, and you may write to us there for now.

  Arabella Godwin, Mrs. Cora, I love you more than life. I wish there was a way I could do my duty without causing you worry, but there isn’t, so I am asking you to be brave, not in the uncommon way that you have always been brave, but with that resigned, enduring bravery that men are forever recommending to women. I am learning that a soldier’s lot is mostly obedience, too. So we must both be patient and hopeful.

  Jeptha

  After I read the first line of this letter, I skipped right to the meat of it, in the third paragraph. Then, with many anguished gasps, and my hand on the edge of the high desk for support, I read it through from the beginning. “Are you all right, ma’am?” asked the clerk, turning the register around to let a middle-aged couple inscribe their names.

  “Yes, thank you.” I was already crossing the lobby with the porter when, as an afterthought, I turned back to the clerk. “Could you …” He raised his chin and eyebrows, ready to serve. “Where is Fort Schuyler?”

  “I will find that out for you,” he promised.

  The man who had just finished writing in the register put down the pen and said, “It’s north of here. On a place called Throgs Neck.”

  And his wife spelled out, “T-H-R-O-G-S.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome,” said the man. “That’s where they’re putting the troops before they head south,” he told his wife, and they both glanced at me sympathetically.

  I went to my room, where I paced the floor with clenched fists, sat down, got up, and slapped the furniture. How could he do this to me, when he knew what I had suffered with Charley, when he claimed to love me more than life? I paced and I cursed, and then I formed a series of increasingly risky plans, each to be undertaken only if the one that preceded it had failed.

  I knew it would be at least a few weeks before the regiment headed south, so I wrote first to Jeptha, asking when I might see him.

  I went the next morning to the headquarters of the Union Defense Committee, hoping to find Colonel E. D. Baker, or at least Robert. Neither of them was there. The men who were in charge made it evident that at thirty-three I was still adorable and trivial, and they promised to convey my message to Baker. I wrote to him, explaining that an awful mistake had been made. My men could not be soldiers. They were badly needed by me, by me much more than by their country.

  When I received Baker’s reply, I saw that it had been an error to include Edward in my request. It made me sound absurd. I sounded like every other woman—every actual woman not invented for a patriotic speech or a recruiting poster—demanding that her man be spared to plow her fields and warm her bed.

  I decided to try Robert. I must use Robert to get to Baker. It would be unpleasant for both of us, since he had hoped not to see me again for years, perhaps ever.

  The sun shone brightly the next day, bringing out the color in the striped window awnings along the streets. The East River was as placid as a pond, so that the ships all had long, pale wakes, and the air was so still that smoke from chimneys went straight up but smoke from steamboats slanted back toward their sterns. A ferry took me to Brooklyn, and a hack took me up over a few steep hills to the home Robert shared with Amanda and their children an
d three servants. The housekeeper recognized me from my previous visit. She let me in, and I played hide-and-seek with the children until Amanda came home. We had a pleasant meal on the veranda with a view of the harbor, ships, factories, wharves, fisheries, and warehouses. The water turned from quicksilver to slate as clouds moved in from the east, and at last over New York City these same clouds were stretched out wide and pressed down hard until they bled.

  I discussed my problem with Amanda. At first, with those red, white, and blue ribbons in her hair, she counseled me to be brave. I asked her if Robert was planning to go. With eyes cast downward, she admitted that she was preventing him. After a few quiet minutes, she warned me that Robert did not like pulling strings to make exceptions for his friends, and would not like doing what I proposed; she began advising me of the best way to get around him.

  “Put me alone with him,” I told her. “I know what to say.”

  Wheels crunched the gravel, the door-knocker rapped, and we watched from the landing of the stairs while my brother gave his black stovepipe hat and his black frock coat to the maid. He looked in the mirror, running a hand over his thinning hair, while the servant spoke to him. I saw his back straighten—he had been told I was here. He had thought he would not have to go through this again for years. And what could I have been saying to Amanda all this time, what might I have revealed? When he looked into the house, the first thing he saw was that we were both watching him. He made himself smile—“Arabella! Again!”—and went halfway up the stairs, while I went halfway down. We reached our arms out and gripped each other’s elbows.