Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  “Maybe God is an artist,” Paul said. “He paints with light.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “By no means.”

  A sound from downstairs demolished these year-old memories. Achilles, Great Rock Farm’s mastiff watchdog, began growling. Was it John Nelson and his monstrous friend, Bogert? Trembling violently, Hannah sprang out of bed and lit a candle. Achilles growled again. “Paul,” she cried. “Paul.”

  She heard his feet strike the floor in his bedroom and come pounding down the hall. He burst into her room in his nightshirt, a pistol in his hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Dear God, what art thou doing with that thing?” she said, relapsing into the Quaker idiom of her youth,

  “I sleep with it on my night table whenever they’re on the farm.”

  The dog continued to growl. “Put it away,” Hannah said. “I won’t have thee die on my account.”

  “What I do for you is my affair.”

  “I love thee for it, nonetheless,” she said.

  Achilles stopped growling. The house was silent except for an occasional creak and groan in the northeast wind. Snowflakes whirled against the windows. Hannah shivered in the fireless cold. She got back under the covers. But she continued to tremble. Her heart pounded, and rivulets of fear swelled in her throat.

  “It’s all right,” Paul said.

  The words only recalled the moment in the Hackensack town house, when those malignant faces ascended the stairs toward her.

  “I told Walter Beckford to forbid them to come near the house. I’m sure he’s done it.”

  Hannah could only shake her head while the fear flooded her body. “It’s not just them. It’s everything. The war, Hugh. I’ve lost him, Paul. He blames me for bringing him back from the islands. I think he blames me for everything that’s wrong. He loathes the sight of me.”

  “He’s a spoiled bastard.”

  “I’ve begun to wonder if he ever loved me.”

  “He loved you. I considered it miraculous. Hugh Stapleton in love with something besides himself, or a chance to improve some moneys.”

  For a moment she almost told Paul the secret reason why she had lost Hugh. What he had said to her, on their first night together, after he returned from the West Indies. She had been in bed, waiting for him to join her, ready to give herself to him with all the ardor of their early years. He had come into the room and paused before the mirror. He had picked up a brush from the bureau and passed it through his hair. Facing himself in the mirror, he had said, “It’s been three years. I’m sure you don’t imagine I’ve been indifferent to other women for such a length of time. But I’ll try to be as faithful from now on as I was before.”

  Why had he said such a thing? Hannah asked herself again. Despite his worldly ways, did his conscience bother him? That was small consolation for the devastating impact on her feelings. Didn’t he see that those words reduced her love from a sacred gift to a convenience? For a dizzying moment she hated him. A demon seemed to possess her. She wanted to denounce him, revile him.

  Instead, she had fumbled out words of mild regret, of humble hope that their love would soon be restored. But it proved impossible. She could barely kiss him that first night. Her lips had been dry and hard, as if they were caked with dirt. In the morning, there had been none of the tender, bawdy talk with which he used to tease her. He had not sought her again for the better part of a week, and the result had been the same, perhaps worse. Behind her submission she found herself asking mad, raging questions about the other women he had known.

  By day she had watched helplessly while the spiritual poison spread through their lives. They could agree on nothing. Hugh had glanced at the portraits Paul had painted of her and said she looked like a witch. He recommended burning them. She had been speechless with resentment. Paul, used to the cutting remarks that Stapletons aimed at each other, was unruffled. Hugh continued his destructive way. He found fault with the education of their eight-year-old son, Charles. She had been teaching him herself since his local school had shut down because of the war. Hugh decreed that the boy should go to live with his Kemble cousins in Morris County, where the schools were flourishing beyond the reach of loyalist raiders. Then, within a month of Hugh’s return, he had announced his decision to go to Congress.

  When she had urged him to come home from the islands, she had not given a thought to Congress. She had wanted Hugh to replace his father as the man who could rally the country militia and protect her and her neighbors against nightly terror. But Hugh had no interest in such heroics. Philadelphia offered him an opportunity for the one thing that did interest him, a chance to do business on a grand scale. To be able to combine this opportunity with an escape from his long-faced, passionless wife and cloak it in the name of the patriotism she had inflicted on him was too delicious to resist.

  Hannah saw through her husband’s patriotic charade, which was now wearing thin. She recognized the dimension of his desertion, which was spiritual as well as physical. Suddenly she wanted to tell Paul everything.

  Instead, Paul told her the truth she had not been able to face. “I think the real trouble is not Hugh’s failing to love you. I think you could bear that. I think you’ve stopped loving him.”

  Confessional tears streamed down Hannah’s cheeks. “What shall I do, Paul? There are times when I only want to die.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’ll love me instead. I herewith give you permission.” Almost casually, he slipped under the covers and held her in his arms. Her trembling gradually ceased. “You’ll practice on me. A sinner who refuses to confess his sin, a cynic who sneers at patriotism. If you succeed with me, you’ll soon be able to love Hugh again in spite of his hard heart.”

  “I love thee already. Not as a wife, I know that’s not possible. But as a brother, a friend. I would love thee perfectly if only . . . “

  “I wasn’t a neutral?”

  “Yes. But I don’t reproach thee. I understand.”

  “I’m not neutral. I haven’t been neutral since that night in Hackensack.”

  He began telling her about his secret life as a spy.

  Mounted on Horace, the old plow horse that had brought him from Lebanon to Morristown, Caleb Chandler rode slowly across snowbound New Jersey toward Bergen. The journey through the white landscape was dreamlike. Caleb kept lapsing into visions of Major Benjamin Stallworth’s snarling face; he kept hearing his furious voice, compounding, magnifying the inner voice that whispered, fool. Stallworth was telling him that he had been, that he was, a fool on a continental scale. His idiocy had spiraled out of his stupid mouth and naive brain to become a whirlwind, threatening to engulf the army, the cause, the country.

  Caleb did not spend all his time writhing in humiliation. There was a middle region of rage and hatred into which he occasionally escaped. Stallworth was an abomination! What made him especially sickening was the uncanny way he parodied, with his denunciations, his apostrophes to military necessity, so many ministers Caleb had heard at Yale. Stallworth was a product of New England’s theology even though he had ceased to believe it. He still spoke on behalf of that awesome God, in whose name human nature was damned with unrelenting severity. In pursuit of the same craven obedience Stallworth demanded, God’s ordained servants howled down self-respect, affection. Stallworth made Caleb realize how much he loathed the faith he was ordained to preach. He detested it as totally as he despised Stallworth’s military necessity. Yet that necessity, and the God of New England, still controlled his life. Here he rode, shivering in the blasts of the Great Cold, a pseudo-minister and a secret agent, a prisoner of both tyrannies.

  For fragmentary moments, Caleb escaped from both rage and humiliation, and glimpsed a zenith of icy doubt. What if Stallworth were lying? What if he was the British master spy and everyone - Caleb, Flora Kuyper, poor Joel Lockwood, even General Washington - was his dupe. Caesar had been killed only a hundred yards from Washington’s door. Perhaps he had been
on his way to headquarters to tell someone the truth and Stallworth or one of his confederates had killed him? Perhaps that was why Caleb was being shunted off to Flora Kuyper and from her to the British spymaster, Beckford.

  Impossible? Was it any more impossible than Stallworth’s sneer about Flora Kuyper: She fucks for the King. Could so much beauty, gentleness, kindness, survive that kind of corruption? In his student days, Caleb had gone down to New Haven’s waterfront and visited the taverns where the whores of the town picked up sailors. He wanted to test his feelings face to face with such women. He had felt nothing but revulsion. They were the sorriest saddest jades he had ever seen; hair streeling, beer slopping down their chins; their desperate gaiety was as pathetic as it was false. He could not believe Flora Kuyper had anything in common with these women. He could not believe his feelings about another human being, even granted his pitifully small experience with the female sex, could be so misleading.

  Down the road across the salt marshes of Newark Bay, Horace plodded. A few gulls wheeled overhead in the gray sky, calling, Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, in their brainless way. For a moment Caleb wondered what would happen if he simply kept going, if he rode past the gate to Flora Kuyper’s farm and fled to his father’s house. There, surrounded by friends, he could seek the aid of Congressman William Williams and dare Benjamin Stallworth to pursue him.

  No. He could not bear the thought of his older brothers’ condescension, the distress of his mother and father, his own humiliation as he tried to explain why, in four short months, he had turned from a patriot chaplain to a fugitive. Before it was over, he would be a little boy again, pleading for his father’s protection. He could hear his brothers saying: Knew we should never have let Parson Lockwood send him to Yale. Now what we got to show for all that tuition money, Pap? A disgrace, that’s what.

  He would see Flora Kuyper. He would perform the absurd part Stallworth had written for him. He hoped she would throw him out of the house and he could return to Morristown and ask: What now?

  There was the Kuyper farmhouse on its little rise, the huge old oak beneath which Caesar Muzzey lay in the frozen earth. Suddenly Caleb was remembering the evening he had spent with Flora Kuyper. He was standing behind her at the harpsichord, his hands only inches away from those exposed shoulders, the graceful neck. He heard Stallworth snarling: She fucks for the King. No.

  Caleb banged the brass knocker. The wind hissed across the porch like the stroke of a Continental Army whip. Cato in his blue-and-red livery opened the door.

  “Ah, Cato. Is your mistress home?”

  “No, sir,” said Cato, blocking the Kuyper doorway. “Gone visiting.”

  “I’m on my way back from Connecticut,” Caleb lied. “I had to escort a sick soldier home to Stamford. I thought it would not be amiss to say hello.”

  Cato said nothing. He continued to block the door.

  “I brought along a copy of William Billings’s songbook for you.”

  Cato seemed to make up his mind about something. “That’s very kind of you, sir,” he said. “Won’t you come in? Mistress may be away for some hours.”

  “That’s all right. I would wait several hours for the pleasure of seeing her,” Chandler said.

  Couldn’t Cato hear the fumbling lie in those words? Caleb wondered. Apparently not. The black man ushered him into the warm parlor and soon returned with a flagon of mulled wine. “I’m glad to see you, sir,” Cato said. “For a special reason. My wife and I have been praying and fearing for our mistress this past week. She’s so melancholy, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s not for me to say, sir. Maybe it’s the bad times, the war. We think it’s also a trouble in her soul, sir. That’s why we hoped someone like you, a man with spiritual training, might speak to her about it.”

  “These times are more than enough to trouble anyone’s soul.”

  “Sir,” Cato said after a moment of inner debate, “I can’t give you more than hints. Caesar - he was bad, sir. A bad man. He let Satan rule him. Mistress feels guilty for some things he did. If you could talk to her, sir, you might free her soul from Caesar’s sin.”

  Caleb was touched by Cato’s concern for Flora. This black man was a caring Christian. He decided it was best to play the naive young cleric for the time being. “I’ll do my best to help your mistress, Cato. But she must ultimately confess her guilt to God.”

  “I know that, sir. But she needs someone to lead her soul to it. Sometimes you’ve got to get down on your knees and work with sinners. You’ve got to feel their guilt and make them feel the Lord’s forgiveness.”

  “You do that?”

  “Yes, sir. Many a time I’ve done it.”

  For a moment Caleb saw the Reverend Joel Lockwood striding down the main street of Lebanon, Connecticut. Men hastily doffed their hats to him, ladies curtsied. Joel Lockwood bowed his head, acknowledging their obeisance. His word, his station, his presence, had been supreme in Lebanon. People may have gotten down on their knees before him, but never with him.

  Cato left Caleb sipping his mulled wine, his mind in even worse turmoil. He did not want to think of Flora Kuyper as a troubled woman. He was not here as a minister of the gospel; he was a member of the army of the United States of America under orders. He was a servant of necessity. He stopped, appalled by what this meant, by what was happening in his soul.

  About an hour later, Caleb stood at the window, watching snowflakes begin to fall from the gloomy sky, as they did almost every night at twilight. Flora Kuyper, driving a small one-horse sleigh, turned into the drive and approached the house. She was wrapped in the same purple cloak she had worn to Caesar’s funeral. Caleb stayed in the parlor and let Cato tell her of his presence. A few minutes later, she entered the room. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. She wore a formal smile on her lips. “Mr. Chandler,” she said, “what a pleasant surprise.”

  “As I told Cato-”

  “Yes. He told me. I hope, despite all my warnings, you haven’t taken this dangerous route just to see me.”

  She frowned as she said this, and he noticed circles of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.

  “I must confess, the answer is in part yes. But it was also pastoral, madam. I promised to deliver a copy of William Billings’s songbook to Cato. I think it will increase the devotion of his people.”

  “That is most kind. Religion is their consolation. Anything that adds pleasure to it is certain to be welcome.”

  He raised his wineglass. “To your health, madam. “Have you been well?”

  “As well as I deserve to be.”

  “Deserve to be? Madam, I can’t believe you have any cause to be sent an illness.”

  “I’m flattered by your good opinion.”

  Cato came in with a cup of broth on a tray. Flora Kuyper thanked him and sipped it for a moment. Caleb Chandler found himself sinking beneath the spell of her beauty again. Her sadness stirred an irresistible tenderness in his soul.

  He finished his wine and put the glass on a tea table. Solemnly, agonizingly aware of their crudity, he began reciting the lines Stallworth had written out for him and forced him to memorize like an actor in a play.

  “I haven’t been well, madam, since I saw you.”

  “Why not?”

  “My mind has been disturbed, upheaved, more than I thought possible. At first, I blamed it on your beauty alone. But the more I dwelled on it, night after sleepless night, the more I realized it was something else. Something far more terrible. I could bear loving you, madam, from a hopeless distance. But I can’t bear the thought that I merited your contempt.”

  “Why do you feel such a thing?”

  “For my pusillanimous attempt to defend my country, madam, from the charges, the just and terrible charges, you placed against it. In the matter of slavery and, linked to it in a mysterious way, the matter of Caesar Muzzey’s death.”

  “Mr. Chandler,” she said, “I hope you haven’t been telling people that I’m an enemy of the Uni
ted States. I’ve gone to such lengths to prove my patriotism, sending Caesar to the army, donating provisions from the farm.”

  “I’m not so obtuse, madam,” Caleb said. “I know too well the jealous rage of fanaticism that such talk might loose on you. I’ve kept our conversation locked in my breast. But it has festered there, like an infection, destroying my smug assumptions.”

  “I’m sorry I spoke so frankly.”

  “On the contrary, such exchanges of truth, of true sentiment, are the heart of life, worth a million words of polite but empty conversation.”

  “I see you’re like me. You value the motions of the heart above the cautions of the head.”

  Caleb was staggered. She was accepting his fake sincerity at its face value. He realized that she was also discounting the clumsiness, the labored style of his declaration. It was only to be expected from a country bumpkin.

  He could not stop now. He could not quit the play. Stallworth and a horrified fascination kept him in his part. “The - the motions of the heart,” he said. “Yes. I admire sincerity above all things. That’s why I’ve decided to resign from the army and play no further role in the contest that’s destroying us. In part, it’s a requirement of honor, in part a wish, a hope, to win your good opinion.”

  “Mr. Chandler,” she said, “you overwhelm me. I’m not worthy of, or capable of rewarding, such a sacrifice.”

  “Madam,” he said, “you must have no mirrors in this house. Or else your modesty is so great you never bother to look in them.”

  Flora smiled, turning him speechless again. “Mr. Chandler,” she said, in a voice measurably softer than the one she had been using, “your compliments are much too extravagant. But” - frowning again - “I’m serious. I felt a certain affection for you when we met last week. In a better world, we might have become friends. But too much separates us.”

  “Too much? A few dozen miles between New Jersey and Connecticut? Let me emphasize, madam, it’s not only your person but the truth of your observations about my country that have demolished me. I will even confess to thinking the unthinkable: going over to the King’s side.”