Beheld
Page 7
He’s Dutch, she said, losing patience.
Girls! her father called. He was coming down the hall, closer.
Is my desire delusional or is it good? she whispered.
I told her I did not know.
Johannes was the man Dorothy would have married, I believe, had her parents not forbidden it.
At the doorway her father said, William Bradford is coming to dinner.
Run along, now, Alice, he said to me.
And to Dorothy: Tell Mother to take in her finest dress.
Dorothy had flints of gold in her eyes. It was as if a breeze had blown in through an open window and thrust her life into new relief.
Though older, I was the girl to run along and Dorothy was the woman.
At that time, what we knew of William was what was whispered at church. He was a new arrival from England and had traveled to Holland alone. He had full brown waves of hair and one of the most alluring conversion stories.
He had nearly died after both his parents and sister died, too, and in a fever state he had a vision: that God had higher plans for him. William fell ill for weeks, then months, and was punished with the pleasure of reading books in bed rather than work in the field. One day he awoke with energy as he had not had since his mother was alive. A voice whispered to him, Scrooby. He walked at once—a half day’s journey—to Scrooby, where he came upon the village mailman, William Brewster. Mailman by day, and by night a secret pamphleteer against the King, which Brewster printed on his illegal printing press. He was the host of private, forbidden gatherings, where people studied the Bible in his home. There is no uncorrupted Church of England, the group argued. We must leave. Bradford’s uncles heard of where he went in the evenings and more directly than they were wont to do, said, Do not believe what those puritans say. His uncles’ persistence persuaded William further that he was following the right path.
If William had stayed with his uncles in England, he would have lived a comfortable English life from his inheritance. But with one pair of worn-out boots and a sturdy ploughman’s gait, the young William fled his uncles’ home and followed Brewster’s group to Holland. He came to Holland with no money as we knew it but the promise of his parents’ inheritance. Here he was then, in Amsterdam, now a man of twenty-two, inviting himself over to Dorothy’s house.
Dorothy walked me to the back door, but we stood at the threshold.
He wants to marry you, I said.
Dorothy said, A dinner is hardly a proposal. But she smiled and touched her hair.
I was eager to hear the details, pressing her, a preference for imagining. Happy, in a melancholy way, to watch it unfold while looking from afar.
Her mother called her away. Her mother’s voice was always shriller than it needed to be when she called Dorothy’s name.
The next morning, while laundering, Dorothy told me what had happened.
Her mother took up the sleeves of her own second-best dress for Dorothy to wear for the occasion, and Dorothy felt as if she were her mother. At dinner, William was proper, as he always was before we knew him. She was stiff with all the things she thought but felt she could not say in front of her parents. All her words felt childish. Her mother smelled of sour milk, which she whiffed on the dress while leaning over to pass the peas. She was reluctant to choose a husband, to think of marriage, and the dress further strengthened her reluctance. This spun her, at dinner, inward. She would have an ungrateful daughter and twitter around the house in nervous anticipation for someone else’s future. Her face would show that she had frowned more often than smiled. All of these things I tried to assure her were not true, but she increased the speed of her words.
That evening, after William left, Dorothy warmed her feet at the fire and stitched. She told me she thought of this new despair, growing out of childhood, and as if that weren’t enough, her worry was interrupted by the sensation that she had peed herself. She had not taken off her mother’s dress. She stood in a panic and slipped the dress down her body. The backside of the dress was red.
The marker of womanhood had arrived, but more foreboding than that, she had to tell her mother. She took the dress upstairs and dipped it in the washbasin. Ribbons of blood waved in the water. Despite her scrubbing, the blood could still be seen on the dress. She took it to her mother, held it up, and apologized.
Her mother embraced her. And in her mother’s arms, in her tight hug, she lifted her daughter slightly off the ground, and said, Congratulations.
When her mother inquired about Master Bradford, as we called him then, Dorothy said little. Dorothy told me she felt certain her love was for Johannes.
But her parents found out. Her father came home early and saw a kiss. He shouted Johannes out of the house. Dorothy tried to explain.
He loves me. We shall marry.
Too young, her father said.
And when Dorothy still persisted, he said, Too Dutch.
She was fourteen then, the age when our cousins were planning their betrothals.
I can ride a horse well, I can keep house, I sew, I—
Her father shook his head. He was balding. Betwixt wisps of hair, where, if he were royalty, a crown might reside, was a shiny white skull. He was not royalty, but he was of wealth.
It did not matter what she said.
But, Father, Dorothy said, and her father waved her voice away with his hand.
Her mother was gentler about the subject. She waited until the two of them were outdoors laundering to say to Dorothy, Tell me about him.
What did we know then about love, about marriage?
Nothing.
He gripped her in the drawing room, he gripped her in the alley. She would not know another gripping in this way, because it was her first, but she knew this was not the thing to say to her mother. Dorothy stumbled and said the things she thought her mother would like to hear. About what he could provide—but he could provide little—and when that was clearly a misstep, she spoke of his good deeds, the outer signs that he was chosen by God, part of the Elect.
But that was too much for her mother.
Honestly, Dorothy, her mother said, and took the clothes inside.
She conveyed all of this to me while we sipped her father’s tea.
Am I too vain? she asked me. Is my desire delusional?
In her eyes was the shimmer of tears before they fall. I did not know what to say to her, but I knew whatever I did say, I should be steadfast. I took her hand.
Let it be as God intends, I said.
Dorothy nodded with a wobbly chin.
But no answer had to be given, for what God intended was illness.
The next morning, smallpox seized her. She lay in her mother’s bed. I went to her.
I deserve this, she said. It is my desire.
The pink sores on her face emerged first as faint circles, then ballooned with fluid that tightened her skin. She stared at them in the hand mirror, willing them to pop. But her urge to squeeze them was dampened by the pain it would cause, and her mother’s warning of the deeply embedded pocks that would mark her face forever—if she lived through it—and mar her chances at a suitable husband.
It is my passion, she said.
But when her mother asked her to say more, she said nothing.
God tests, her mother said.
The fever increased the rapidity of her thoughts. Delirium, and she thought she saw Johannes in the doorway and she thought he kissed her in the morning.
Was he here while I slept? she asked me.
I assured her he was not.
She said she saw a woman with long brown hair, in a black mourning dress, standing at the foot of her bed, watching.
I’ll die, she said. I’ll die from my desires.
But she did not die from them, at least not then. Dorothy repeated to me all the family members she knew who had died from smallpox—Henry, Mary, Uncle—and asked me to entertain her, which I felt I did poorly, by telling her what a fool one cousin made of herse
lf in front of a suitor and relaying the new wet nurse’s blunders.
Dorothy spoke of the number of pocks she once saw on the face of her sister Katherine, when she lay in her coffin. Dorothy had half. Queen Elizabeth was rumored to have survived an extreme case and so, too, I reasoned, could she.
One morning, Pastor Robinson paid her a visit. She lay on her bed and confessed to God and to Pastor Robinson, I have been vain. I have been prideful.
If only God would spare me, she said.
Her desires were natural, Pastor Robinson assured her, as well as a test from God. I could not see how she spoke to him so openly, but death had not appeared so close yet on my bosom. Like all good conversion stories, hers was a far better one than my own.
Color began to return to her face. She showed again an appetite.
Did it comfort her to observe her own desire growing fainter and to know that she was one of them now, of the brethren who had confessed and joined again with God? It did not comfort me, because I was too vain to confess, too ashamed to admit my shame.
Before, when we were bored listening to the sermons, we looked at the faces around the church and whispered, What do you think she did to bring her closer to God? And what about him?
She no longer wished to play this game with me. Alone, I imagined the actions and desires of their lust, greed, and envy. In the days before I thought I really needed God, this made the church mornings go by quickly, but not as fast, doing it alone.
But that was years ago, the love of a young person, in vanity, looking for a more beautiful reflection. When Dorothy was well again, she asked if I would help her find Johannes.
But you’ve renounced him, I said.
I must first say goodbye.
Together we looked for Johannes in shop windows, clothiers, and bookstores. We stalled coming home from the market. No one had yet taken an interest in me unless at my father’s urging, and I was happy to be conspiratorial with her, searching for one boy in a town of thousands. Six weeks passed this way and when I asked about him, she finally shrugged and said, I never loved him. But I did not believe that to be true.
One Saturday, at the market, while reaching for an apple, someone took Dorothy’s hand.
We turned.
Johannes said, I’m going to.
His eyes moved back and forth over hers. He had threatened it before, the military. He was searching her face for an expression. He was looking for her to tell him not to do it.
Let go of me, Johannes, Dorothy said.
Her mother was close by, pressing the pears for ripeness. She could look up at any moment. I was standing an arm’s length from her, a presence that could judge, perhaps, after all the days she had said she did not care for him at all.
The light made his face even more golden. She told him that she had confessed and that her love now was for God.
This was Dorothy May, so composed. This was the Dorothy May I knew her to have become, never distempered in public. A good girl, as her mother had praised her to be.
Her mother turned. Dorothy pulled back. He went away. A week passed.
Then one day a blond head poked around an alleyway corner. Johannes appeared at Dorothy’s back door with a new haircut. He knew the trouble his presence would cause if caught. There were bug bites on his arms and legs. He was in new boots and wool socks the color of his grey sheep.
I’m going this afternoon, he said.
He was in front of her, those full lips, those new boots. He had done it.
Dorothy bit her lip.
But the Spanish, she said.
Only a self-murderer, she told me afterward, would enlist in the Dutch military when the truce was ending.
He had wanted to be an artist, but instead he became a soldier.
Dorothy’s mother called for her from the drawing room. Dorothy left him this way. She told me she had wanted him to persist. William would have. William would have said, Dorothy. Look at this! He would have fought hard for her. And by the end of the conversation she would have agreed to be betrothed despite her parents’ concern. All that, though, came later. Dorothy never heard from Johannes again.
William Bradford waited. For Dorothy, he needed more than an orphan’s promise. We never spoke of this—wealth was too embarrassing to discuss—but even at fourteen I knew where I stood. Her parents were amongst the wealthiest. Mine were not. William was a good Englishman, our parents said, but even that was not enough for a family of her parents’ standing. William knew as much. When his inheritance sum arrived, he proposed. In her vow to God, and soon, to William, Dorothy and I no longer drank her father’s tea in secret. As happens, we were no longer one another’s dearest consorts.
John Billington
He found Standish at the meetinghouse conferring with the elders.
Billington went to the group—Winslow, Bradford, and Standish—with a pile of beaver pelts over his shoulder. They looked at him with surprise.
I belong here as much as you, Billington thought to himself.
He lowered his head down to Standish’s height and addressed him. May I speak with you?
Go on, Standish said.
Privately.
Billington knew three men against one would not be in his favor. Where one could be sympathetic or negotiated with at least, the third would point out what the other two forgot.
Standish placed his eyes upon the pelts and raised his eyebrows.
Very well then, Standish said, and motioned toward the stairs.
Billington could have spoken to Bradford. This may have been a better move, but it was Bradford he had first been so quickly dismissed by.
Standish and Billington went upstairs to the loft. The two men sat on two upturned crates. All of this prolonged the anticipation and Billington’s agitation. He shouldn’t have needed to do this. He set down the pelts and gathered his hands, pinching the skin betwixt his thumb and forefinger.
Billington said, I’d like to purchase the land adjacent to mine.
He hated that he was uncomfortable, sweating, not steady in his voice.
Standish smirked.
With what funds?
Billington motioned to the pelts. He lifted his cloak and opened the purse of wampum and sterling.
I did not know you to be a skillful trapper. What crime did you commit to get this?
Billington scowled.
Of course you accuse me thus.
Standish said, In any case, the land was given to a man who arrived this morning. John Newcomen.
Billington had worked hard to find these funds and as he saw it, if he were a puritan, he would have been able to trade openly with the Indians anyway, so what he did to get this was not a crime.
Tell him it was a mistake, Billington said.
I can’t do that, Master Billington. He’s working the land as we speaketh.
Why not purchase—and at this, Standish spoke of a low land with rich soil, which he described as the most fertile, with the most potential. Lies.
I want the land next to mine, not some marsh that even the deer do not visit. I want the land my son was owed.
Funds obtained illegally are no good here. Did you trade with the Indians to get this?
Prove that is what I have done.
Standish smiled. He put out his hands, palms up.
The proof, Master Billington, is sitting before me.
And there again was Standish’s smirk and then a laugh.
Trading with Indians is, as you know, a punishable offense. Thank you for confessing thus.
I did no such thing. This was true, he had not confessed. He liked the way saying this suggested he had not traded.
Billington, when we prove those pelts came from the Indians, which we will prove, you will be tried for committing a heinous crime against the colony.
Billington heaved the pelts back over his shoulder.
You, Shrimp, are a crime.
Standish stood. If I were you, I would apologize.
H
e shouldn’t have said it, but he did, and he would not apologize. Billington would reach for Shrimp, he would, or Shrimp would spring at Billington and not be punished, and then Billington would no longer have the pelts, the wampum, the land, or his freedom. Instead, Billington rushed down the stairs and out of Shrimp’s presence before the man—and his own desires—could catch him.
Alice Bradford
I loved and envied her. I did so as a sister does, and when we cut our knees—one of our last times climbing over rocks as unwed women—we touched our blood together.
Dorothy said, Now we are sisters.
William Bradford proposed to Dorothy in the fall of her sixteenth year. I thought they were illuminated by God’s good light and when they married at the Amsterdam courthouse in December, I was the witness. At the courthouse, she shivered. As men and women of God, it was understood we were not to make a fuss of a marriage ceremony’s earthly trappings. William reminded Dorothy of this when she reached for the most fragrant hyacinth bouquet at the market to take with her to be married. They were grown in a greenhouse, where the gardener approximated spring before its time. Therefore, the flowers were not of a modest sum. One was to be modest in all things. William believed that, and we did, too, in principle. But young girls have fancy, which feels like freedom, which maybe is freedom. The fancy fell away for both of us in marriage. Not because of our husbands, exactly, and not even, perhaps, because of marriage, but because of time. We got older.
Meanwhile, my parents arranged more invitations for me. Dinner included my lazy third cousin, who inherited land in England and new congregates with money but suspicious pasts. I enjoyed the meals my mother made for the occasions, but not the dinner conversation nor the looks my parents gave me afterward. My menses had not yet come and, not wanting to be left behind, I was urgent for it to arrive.
One day, Edward Southworth came to dinner. He had a moustache that extended over his top lip and was naturally slender. These two things, like his temperament, never changed. He was at the cusp of old age. His hair was salt and pepper, with two orange strands framing his face, thin and flattened, even in the thick, wet air of Holland, where it rained more often than it did not. But his hands were soft, not cracked and calloused, but well-treated hands, as if he were a person who was kind to himself and that which he touched. Of the men my parents planned for me, he held the most financial promise. It was said he had descended from royalty but gave up that ease to follow God’s higher plan and join us in Holland. With age comes well-worn ways, and thankfully for me, his ways were gentle. This assessment was one of the few I made at fifteen that I was not later embarrassed by.