Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  *

  Mama sent me long letters of encouragement thrice weekly for many months. She even overcame her fear of the memories hiding everywhere in our home to stay for an extended visit. Once, after putting the girls to bed, she took me aside and said, “I know it’s of little use to tell you this now, but I shall say it anyway. You were the best of husbands to Francisca, and I feel certain that she died without any regrets – without anything left unsaid. I do not think you could have given her a greater parting gift than that. When you meet again, there will be nothing you need to apologize for. And that, John, is a priceless blessing.”

  *

  Much had happened in the world beyond the borders of our provincial city since my marriage to Francisca, of course, including Napoleon’s death. But the vicissitudes of politics caused us little concern until almost a year after my wife’s burial, when the French army crossed the Pyrenees into Iberia to quash a Spanish rebellion in favor of liberal reform.

  During a period of nightmares in which I imagined these troops continuing west to Porto and silencing our city again with their muskets and swords, I received a letter from New York. Holding it in my hands, I learned that the ink of the past had not dried so completely as I’d thought. Closing my eyes, I saw a lonely lass in a black bonnet tossing pebbles at my window.

  Tears filled my eyes when I saw her handwriting. As though it were a triumph against all evil, I whispered to myself, She made it to America!

  I actually received two letters from Violeta, the second arriving three days later, as it had been sent to me care of the Douro Wine Company and delivered by one of their couriers. Violeta explained that she had taken care to send two, as she didn’t know whether I was still living at the same address. The letters were identical save for one sentence.

  She explained almost nothing of how she had reached New York, saying only that she had lived many years in Lisbon and England, then had been snatched up by good fortune and carried to America. She was living in a house near the southern tip of Manhattan Island. She wished me to know that many colorful birds came to her small garden. One of the most beautiful was blue and white, with a crest.

  I like to think of you, me, and Daniel seeing the same stars at the same moment, our hands touching inside their light, she wrote.

  Her address was Number 73 John Street. She wrote that living on a street named after me always made her smile.

  Toward the end of her letter, she said that many years earlier she had dreamed that Daniel had begged her to write to me. She apologized now for failing to heed his wishes, but she was at the time in no position to do so.

  She hoped I was well, but as she had learned of my father’s death, she feared that her dream had been a harbinger of that terrible event. She sent best wishes to my mother, whom she would never forget for her many kindnesses to her.

  She gave no explanation as to how she had learned of Father’s death, nor how she had discovered I was a tile-maker, nor even if she had learned of Francisca’s death, but she concluded her letter with an astonishing proposal:

  One day, if we should ever meet again, I would like you to execute a tile panel for my home in New York. Perhaps it could be of our lives when we were children. It would be lovely to have something of Porto and that time long gone. Always, Violeta

  In the letter sent directly to my home, she added as a postscript: I was overjoyed to learn that you have two daughters, and I should be honored to meet them someday.

  *

  I didn’t know what to make of it. New York? It was preposterous. I could scarcely imagine making the journey to Lisbon, two hundred miles south.

  I was glad that she had made a good life for herself, of course – it seemed such a blessing after all our misfortunes. But receiving her letters proved too much for my tattered nerves. Behind my locked door, afraid to let my daughters see me, I sobbed alone until dawn.

  *

  By May, the struggle in Portugal between forces favoring our recent constitutional reforms and those hoping for a return to an absolute monarchy had nearly reached the point of civil war. Then we learned that both our parliament and our constitution had been nullified by King João VI and his son Miguel, commander-in-chief of the army, with hundreds of subsequent arrests of their opponents across the country. These unfortunate prisoners favored Miguel’s older brother Pedro, a liberal reformer.

  We knew not what agonies these men might be suffering, but the oldest among us sniffed at the air for the unforgettable scent of burning flesh that they remembered from their youths, when prisoners of the Inquisition were burnt alive in Lisbon and other cities.

  Additionally, with the king and his supporters claiming absolute sovereignty, many of us believed that a French occupation was inevitable, as the great forces at play in that country would wish to ensure that our newly reinforced monarchy was friendly to their interests.

  Quite literally overnight, we were all afraid to voice opinions in public on any subject, no matter how trifling. I never let an English word pass my lips in the street. Luna, Benjamin, and I no longer celebrated Sabbath supper together. Instead, Esther and Graça took turns lighting the candles and I spoke our prayers. We kept our shutters and curtains closed in the evenings.

  I also obliged the girls to put away all the scarves, shawls, and dresses their mother had made for them and to wear only the most modest clothing, as the clergy preferred. As a further precaution, they carried rosaries and whispered an Ave Maria at every opportunity, even to acknowledge a sneeze.

  After being warned by some secret Jews that my name had come up in gossip about Marranos being considered for arrest, I also began making weekly confession, and – with a mixture of spite and juvenile amusement – fashioned tales of adventure involving much intemperate whoring. One of the elderly priests to whom I unburdened my sins quizzed me about the details of my escapades with great eagerness, plainly astounded that I could service so many women. I assured him that it was unusual for me as well, but that I was feeling most inspired by our King’s successes against the dastardly reformers and Jews threatening our moral foundations!

  Two days after the nullification of our constitution, I witnessed a tumultuous gathering of hundreds in New Square, crosses and effigies of saints carried aloft like swords and shields. Both liberals and Marranos were denigrated as enemies of the Portuguese nation and Christ. These were slanders I had not heard since Lourenço Reis’s death, almost nineteen years earlier. Owing to this climate of folly and persecution, Benjamin in particular lived in fear, as it was common knowledge that he gave Torah lessons to anyone desiring them. Indeed, on June the Eighth, he simply vanished, though neither soldiers nor bailiffs had come for him, as far as anyone knew. I tried to learn if he had been jailed, but my inquiries were mocked by both prison officials and clerks at City Hall. Along with other neighbors, I helped board up his shop and home.

  On the night of his disappearance, I dreamed of becoming a flame, then fading to nothingness. All the next day I kept imagining that this nightmare had been a portent of things to come and that my daughters would soon be orphans.

  Three evenings later, while I was rereading Violeta’s letter for what must have been the dozenth time, there was a knock at the door.

  “Who’s there?” called Graça. She was sitting near me, studying a map of Europe.

  As there was no answer, I jumped up and opened the door a crack. It was Benjamin, cloaked from head to foot in black.

  XXVIII

  The girls rushed forward and clung to Benjamin, kissing his cheeks. He feigned a groan at being attacked. His eyes were tired and his gray hair stuck out in a dozen directions. Several days’ growth of white beard stubbled his chin.

  “I’m sorry I was unable to get word to you,” he said, removing his spectacle case from his waistcoat pocket.

  “Where have you been?”

  “A secret. The less you know the better.” He scrutinized me over the rims of his spectacles. I must have been grinning, for h
e said, “What is it, lad?”

  “Just that I shall always think of you that way – two eyes of glass and two of owl.”

  He laughed. Esther moved her chair next to his and held his hand. When Graça asked if he had been in prison, he replied, “Happily, no. I have been helping to ensure the victory of Cyrus. I must return shortly to my hiding place, however, and it is better that you do not know where I am or how I am to accomplish these things.”

  Cyrus was the ancient Persian ruler who, upon conquering Babylon, emancipated the Hebrew people, permitting them to return to Palestine and build their temple anew. Benjamin intended this as a reference to Dom Pedro, the King’s elder son and a champion of democratic reforms. Benjamin believed if Pedro won the throne from his younger brother, Miguel, he would usher in a Golden Age for Portugal and the Jews. Tens of thousands of our brethren exiled by the Inquisition would find their way home from Constantinople, Amsterdam, and other cities in the diaspora.

  For a time, Benjamin sat and talked of trifles with the girls, who prepared us rabanadas. When our stomachs were filled, they bid our guest good night, for I had matters to discuss with Benjamin that I preferred them not to hear.

  Before sending them on their way, he asked them to sit very quietly, then pressed his fingertips to their closed eyes so they might see the inner colors always residing inside them and thereby gain courage from the secret universe to which they each had access. He had them do the same to him. “Now our inner landscapes are joined,” he told them. “Neither you nor your father can ever escape me!” At that, he bared his teeth and growled, a trick he had learned from Midnight.

  When they were safely ensconced upstairs, I told him that I had received a letter from an old friend.

  “Who, dear boy?”

  “Violeta, the lass whose uncle … whose uncle hurt her so badly.”

  “I remember well the prayers we said on her behalf. Where is she now?”

  “In New York, of all places. She wrote that she’d been in London as well.”

  “‘Weep not for the dead nor brood over her loss. Weep rather for she who has gone away, for she shall never return, never again see the land of her birth.’”

  I hazarded a guess: “Isaiah?”

  “Jeremiah,” he replied, shaking his head.

  “In any event, there’s no need for Jeremiah or anyone else to pity Violeta. She wrote that she has been fortunate, and she has invited me to execute a tile panel in her home. I think she has come into money.”

  “Will you go?”

  I shrugged. “It’s awfully far.” I stood up to take my pipe and tobacco pouch from the mantelpiece. “And it’s undoubtedly a bad idea to revisit my past.”

  “Virginia cannot be so very far from New York, can it?” he asked.

  Inside a cloud of smoke, I laughed and said, “I fear I dismissed Professor Raimundo long before reaching American geography.”

  As though revisiting a faraway memory, he looked away and added, “My goodness … Midnight … after all these many years.” He sighed and shook his head. “That would truly be something, finding him, wouldn’t it, dear boy?”

  Thinking Benjamin too tired to know what he was saying, I replied, “Dearest Midnight has been dead for seventeen years. The only place we shall find him now is in our dreams.”

  “Dead? Perhaps not, John. But … what have I said?” The apothecary jumped to his feet. “Dear boy, forgive this old man his wandering thoughts. It’s my mind…. You will see when you are my age. You cannot trust your own thoughts. It’s like living with an impostor.”

  His dramatic denial convinced me that he was concealing something. “It would seem your thoughts have not wandered anywhere but toward some hidden knowledge you may have. Tell me what you meant,” I said hotly.

  “No, no, I meant nothing.” Relying on Ecclesiastes to save him, he said, “A fool’s tongue is his undoing. Forgive me.”

  “Benjamin, this is not a time for quotations from the Torah. You obviously cannot stay long. Now, what’s this about Virginia and Midnight? Tell me now!”

  “John …” He sank down in his chair and held his head in his hands. “I have some letters at my house that I should like to place in your care, dear boy. Forgive me for keeping them from you, but it was your father’s dying wish.”

  I sprang to my feet. “You were with my father when he died?!”

  He looked up sadly. “We were all with James when he died.”

  “I don’t understand. Please, Benjamin, speak plainly.”

  “We shall get the letters and then all will be clear. Come,” he said solemnly.

  “But we boarded up your house.”

  “Bring a hammer. And take a candle with you as well. This cannot wait.”

  As I knew the girls would still be awake, I rushed up the stairs and told them that Benjamin and I were going on a brief errand.

  At his house, we ripped away the planks over one of his windows. Once inside, we retrieved from a locked iron strongbox in his cellar eight letters, all addressed to James Stewart. They were tied with a white ribbon grown yellow with age.

  “In giving you these, I am emptying my pockets of blood-splattered stones,” he said. “They have weighed me down for years. Dear boy, the burden of spoken secrets is great, and of written ones even greater.”

  Holding letters that my beloved father had read, I felt his presence as a pang so sharp and deep that I feared losing myself if I ever stopped feeling it.

  I told Benjamin that I had always felt as though my father’s death, more than any other, had been an error of destiny. I confessed how much better a man I might have been had he been by my side all these years.

  “James is gone,” Benjamin replied, “but the best of him still resides in you. I only hope you will not hate me when you read these.”

  He linked his arm through mine as we walked back to my home. I read the letters in the sitting room, hoping that they might finally solve the riddle of the collapse of my parents’ marriage.

  *

  The first letter was dated October the Sixth, 1806, one month prior to that fateful trip to London by Midnight and Father. It had been posted to Papa from Bristol, England, by a Captain A. J. Morgan:

  Sir, thank you for your letter of the Fourth of September. I believe I do know of a place of work that will meet most, if not all, of the sensible conditions you summarized. There is, in short, a good and prosperous gentleman by the name of Miller living near the port of Alexandria, whom I have had the pleasure to meet on several occasions and who will, I believe, be only too happy to take on a careful and obedient assistant. If you might tell me in your next letter when we may expect delivery of your property here in Bristol or, if you should prefer, at our offices in London, then I should be most pleased to carry out our plan as previously agreed upon.

  The next letter, from the same Captain Morgan, was dated January the Twenty-Seventh, 1807, two months after Midnight’s death:

  Per your instructions, I have successfully placed the property into the hands of Mr. Miller, who was most pleased to receive him. Though he is not speaking at present, the property will, I am sure, relent soon in this willful wickedness and prove most helpful. Mr. Miller is not too inconvenienced by his behavior, I should add, so do not worry yourself unduly. It is not uncommon for such transactions to render the primitive mind disoriented and unruly at first. Under the whip, however, all prove useful and manageable, you can be sure.

  “Benjamin, what is this property that Captain Morgan speaks of?” I asked, afraid to hear what I knew now to be the truth.

  “Please, John, just read on. Then we’ll talk.”

  “But you do know what all this is about? You know?!” I shouted.

  “Alas, I do,” he replied.

  *

  Apparently, Father had thought better of having sold his property to Mr. Miller, and on May the Eleventh of 1807, the Captain wrote:

  I shall certainly endeavor to propose such a transaction to Mr. Miller upon
my return to Alexandria, but I cannot guarantee that he will accept. Surely you were aware, sir, that once sold, you had no claim over the property in question?

  Then, from July the Fourteenth:

  The property is no longer with Mr. Miller, I am sorry to report. The apothecary was taken quite suddenly to God in late May, having been ill for a week with the yellow fever. His sons, having no use for your man, sold him to a local trader. I have made inquiries as to his present whereabouts, but I have been unsuccessful. I fear that we may have lost the trail for good. He may even have been sold further south. The United States is a very large nation and there are thousands of Negroes in every nook, I can assure you. Telling one from the other, even one as diminutive and yellow-hued as yours, will not prove easy, as most Americans are unused to the fine distinctions in primitives to which you so properly refer.

  “Benjamin, my father … my father …” I was dizzy with panic, my thoughts spiraling toward a crime so monstrous that I could not believe it possible. “What in God’s name did Papa do?” I cried.

  “I promise to tell you all I know, dear boy. But you must finish what you’ve started and read all of them.”

  “My parents lied to me for years, didn’t they? And Midnight – oh, God, Midnight, what has happened to him? Where is he? You must tell me exactly where he is. I need to know now, Benjamin. Where is he?!”

  “I cannot say. But the last letters speak of where he may have gone. You’ll see.”

  My hands were freezing. I felt as though all of me had been turned to ice. I took the next letter from the pile:

  It is believed that he must be in one of the Carolinas, perhaps in the city of Charleston, as several score Negroes were marched there to be sold shortly after Mr. Miller’s untimely demise, and your former property may have been among them.

  Your offer of a reward is most generous, and should I discover more information as to his whereabouts, you may rest assured that I shall not hesitate to let you know.