Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  Dr Theodore Parker his name was. If she closed her eyes, she could see him as clearly as if he were still alive, a stooped, white-haired man who seemed very old to her then. He was probably about fifty, she thought. Ancient! But he was a kindly man, and when she came down with pleurisy he put her in bed and nursed her as if she were his own flesh and blood. She remembered how he had asked her if she would like to try and trace her parents.

  ‘No!’ Abby had told him fiercely. ‘They never wanted me when I was a baby. And I don’t want them now!’

  ‘You’re young, child,’ the old doctor said soothingly. ‘As you get older, you’ll want to know about your family. It happens to all of us. You’ll see. And Abby, you do not say “They never wanted me”. The correct way to say it is “They didn’t want me”.’

  He was a kind old man, gentle and understanding. He became the nearest thing that Abby ever knew to a father. He taught her to speak properly, to dress modestly, to look at life with an eye open for its funny side. And when he died she felt as if her world had come to an end. But it was not the end of the world at all: just another chapter.

  So there she was, Abigail Monroe, seventeen years of age, a handsome girl with a fresh complexion and in need of a roof over her head. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know she was going somewhere. She kept the delivery boys and the postmen and the patrolmen at arm’s length. She had no intention of becoming a working man’s wife, drudging away her life in a tenement with a passel of squalling brats clinging to her skirts till she was too old to do anything but drink gin. She was going to be someone, Abby Monroe was. And then Sean Flynn came into her life.

  Ah, Sean, she thought, remembering the corn-yellow hair and the devil’s eyes of him. As ready with his fist as he was with his money and claiming descent on the wrong side of the blanket from a belted earl in Ireland. Abby never really believed any of that because Sean was a great one with the blarney. A woman would be a fool who gave herself to a man like Flynn, Abby told herself. And an even bigger one if she didn’t. And then he was killed in the street brawl and Abby was on her own again, only now pretty sure that there was another life kindling in her belly. So she took the first position she could find, and that was in the house of a New York gun maker by the name of Samuel Strong.

  She avoided Sam at first, on purpose. She addressed him as ‘Your Honor’ and answered all his questions with downcast head. She knew from the way that he looked at her that he had more on his mind than housekeeping matters, but she made herself go slow. It wasn’t easy, knowing for sure now that there was life inside her. She would have to time it very carefully indeed. Then one day he put his fingers under her chin and tipped back her head. She knew he hadn’t anything on his mind but having her, and although she felt no love for him, she let him have his way. And it had been her turn to be surprised, for he was lusty and tireless. Ah, Sam, she thought. Not so lusty now, perhaps, but slower, kinder and infinitely sweeter. The thought of him flooded her senses with pleasure. She had not loved him at first. But love had come, and with it came the realization that, after all, she was someone. All it took was for someone else to need you.

  She looked at the box on the sideboard. It was made of mahogany with an intricate pattern of marquetry on the lid and sides. An old deed box. She had bought it soon after Sam set off with the Frémont expedition in 1844, planning to keep his letters in it. Only, of course, he wrote no letters worth the mentioning, for there was no way he could post them. So the box was still empty on that fateful day when Abby went back to St Joseph’s Orphanage for the first time since she had walked out carrying her carpetbag a quarter of a century earlier.

  It was an open day to raise funds for the school. She went entirely on impulse. There were home-made cakes and bitter tea, and the nuns smiled proudly as the children sang their hymns and performed their dances in that delightful, shyly proud way that little children have. Abby remembered being like them, dressed in those same drab clothes, and she silently thanked God for her own good fortune.

  An orphan’s dreams have very close horizons. She could remember that the biggest dream of all was that one day your parents would come and take you home, and explain how it had all been a mistake and that they had always loved you and wanted you, and how they had searched all over America to find you. As you got older you realized that the dream was never going to come true. So you invented ‘memories’, and as time went by the ‘memories’ became as real as if you had actually lived them. All Abby really knew of herself was what the nuns had told her, that she had been born around the end of 1817. For reasons that she had never fully understood, Abby was sure there had been snow on the ground that day.

  Watching the children, it occurred to her that she might be able to learn more while she was there. Sister Ursula was the oldest nun at St Joseph’s. She frowned when Abby introduced herself.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, my dear,’ she said. ‘There have been so many children—’

  ‘Abigail Monroe,’ Abby repeated, instantly transferred back in time by the words, once again the gawky, spindle-legged girl with pigtails reciting her identification, ‘Named for the fifth President of the United States.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Sister Ursula smiled. ‘You were a good girl. A good girl.’

  So memory plays tricks on all of us, Abby thought. She had been a naughty girl, frequently punished for fighting, arguing, for talking in class, for not doing her work. Perhaps Sister Ursula remembers us all as good girls, she thought.

  ‘Tell me, sister,’ she said. ‘Would it be possible for me to see the records of my admission to St Joseph’s?’

  Sister Ursula’s eyebrows rose. ‘My dear child, of course,’ she said. ‘But what on earth for?’

  ‘I’ve become the unofficial family historian,’ Abby said, with a smile. ‘It’s something to keep me busy while my husband is away in the West.’

  ‘Well,’ Sister Ursula said dubiously, as if she thought delving into family affairs reprehensible, ‘you could speak to the registrar, Mr. Omensby.’

  Abby found Mr. Omensby’s office at the far end of an echoing corridor on the second floor of the orphanage building. Grime gritted underfoot; her steps echoed. The place made her feel uneasy. What did it do to little girls?

  ‘Year 1817, you say?’ wheezed Mr. Omensby. He was a spindly little man with tin-rimmed spectacles that perched on the very end of a narrow nose. He turned the big pages of his ledger, each covered in crabbed handwriting, as though they weighed pounds. ‘1818. And the name was Monroe, you say?’

  ‘Abigail Monroe,’ she said. ‘For the new president.’

  ‘Abigail Monroe, Abigail Monroe,’ he muttered, his finger moving up the lines of names like a snail. Abby’s eyes, much faster, saw her own entry long before he did.

  ‘There,’ she said, putting her finger on the page.

  ‘Don’t touch the ledgers, girl! ‘ he snapped, giving her a look of pained reproach. ‘You’re not allowed to touch the ledgers!’

  ‘There’s my name,’ Abby said. ‘Abigail Monroe. There.’

  ‘I see it, I see it,’ he said, testily. ‘ “Abigail Monroe. Born 1818, possibly late 1817. A female child found on a seat in St John’s Park, Manhattan by patrolman Patrick J. Smith, NYPD Shield Number 869 on February 12, 1818. Estimated age of child, six weeks to two months. Hair brown, eyes brown, weight 6 lb 4 oz. Dressed in good-quality woolen coat and dress, and wrapped in pink woolen blanket. Card with name Abigail pinned to blanket. Miniature gold locket around the baby’s neck. No identifying marks or labels”.’

  ‘What was that about a locket?’ Abby said, all at once strangely breathless.

  ‘A locket, a locket,’ Omensby said impatiently. ‘Didn’t they give it to you when you left?’

  ‘No,’ Abby said. ‘Nobody told me anything about it.’

  ‘Oh, the devil take it!’ he said angrily. ‘If only people would do their jobs properly! They were supposed to have given it to you.’

  �
��Well, they didn’t,’ Abby said. Her heart was pounding. ‘Could I – could you see if it is still here?’

  ‘Good Heavens, girl. I’m not here to run errands for every Tom, Dick or Harry who comes through the door!’ Omensby said. ‘I’m a senior clerk, that’s what I am. I don’t run errands. You’ll have to write in for it.’

  ‘Please,’ Abby said. ‘Couldn’t you look? Just for me? She thought of fluttering her eyelashes and decided against it. The old man gave her a startled look, as though an idea had just occurred to him that made him uneasy.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Ahem.’ His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. It sounded quite loud in the boxlike little office.

  ‘Well,’ he said again, sliding off his stool. ‘You wait here, my dear. Yes, hmm.’ He patted her arm and smiled, then off he went up the stairs, quite quickly. As if to show how spry he was, Abby thought with a grin. Silly old fool. Men were all fools, even when they were as old as this one.

  Ten minutes later he came noisily down the stairs. She heard his wheezy breathing long before he arrived in person, cheeks stained with effort.

  ‘There, there you are,’ he said, handing her an envelope. ‘See it’s got your name on it. Abigail Monroe.’

  Abby took the envelope from the man with shaking hands. Inside it she found a tiny locket on a fine golden chain. On the reverse of the locket was inscribed a heart and inside the heart were two initials, A and H.

  ‘Well?’ Omensby said peevishly. She turned to face him. He was watching her with a strange look, his head cocked on one side. He looks like a decrepit turkey, she thought.

  ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?’ His breathing was very loud. He put forward a tentative hand, touching her breast. Abby slapped him across the face and Omensby reeled back against the high stool. He and it fell on the stone floor with a clattering bump. He touched his split lip with astonishment, then began groping on the floor to find his glasses.

  ‘Needn’t have done that,’ he whined. ‘No need for that at all.’

  ‘Maybe that’ll learn you to keep your nasty groping little hands where they belong!’ Abby said, turning and marching out. ‘Bloody men. You’re all the same!’

  She hurried back home and when she got there, she sat down at Sam’s desk and examined the locket through a big magnifying glass. She could see a fine join: there was an opening then. With a fine knife she gently levered the locket open. Inside was a miniature of a woman with long dark hair in a blue dress. Facing it, in letters so small as to be almost indecipherable, was the inscription ‘Bellamy’.

  Is that my name? Abby wondered. ‘Abigail Bellamy,’ she said aloud. It sounded right but it did not sound familiar. I must find out, she thought. I have to know.

  Her first step was to go to the Astor library on Lafayette Street and find the New York City directories for the years 1815 through to 1819. The policeman had found her in St John’s Park. That was down on the Lower West Side, a pretty square bounded by Varick, Hudson, Beach and Laight Streets. She got a map of the downtown area around the square and, street by street, checked for people with the name Bellamy. As the hours slid past, she realized that she was wasting her time. There were far too many. She couldn’t just walk all over the city, knocking on strangers’ doors and asking questions. There had to be an easier way and she thought she knew the man who could help her. His name was Peter O’Hanlon and he was a reporter for the New York Evening Post.

  O’Hanlon was as Irish as the Mountains of Mourne, a cheerful fellow who’d come to the party Sam Strong threw for the christening of his first son, Travis. He’d a way with him and Abby had almost fallen for him more than once, before she’d come to love Sam. O’Hanlon was the kind who could almost talk you into his bed, but never really pushed it too hard. So Abby had never slipped, but she was still fond of Peter. There was no sex in it any more: at least, not for her. But she knew Peter still harbored vague notions of having her. Men put you into a corner of their minds like that, sometimes, like dried meat in a larder. As if you were going to just hang there waiting for them to get around to you.

  ‘Well now, Abby, and this is a lovely surprise, and all,’ O’Hanlon said when she walked into his cluttered office at the Post building. ‘So you’ve finally decided to come and throw yourself into me arms, is it?’

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ Abby said with a grin. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, Pete.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, with a broad grin. ‘There’s something I’d quite like you to do for me, too.’ He gave her a broad wink.

  ‘You’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get a blush out of me, O’Hanlon!’ Abby retorted.

  ‘Sure, and it’s more than that I’m tryin’ to get.’

  ‘Be serious, now,’ Abby said firmly. ‘I need your help.’

  His grin vanished and he nodded towards a bentwood chair. ‘Take the weight off your feet, darlin’,’ he told her. ‘And I’ll listen to your tale of woe.’

  ‘If you wanted to find someone in New York but whose address you didn’t know, where would you start?’

  ‘Rich or poor?’

  ‘Don’t know. But not poor.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘One of each.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘H. Bellamy and A. Bellamy.’

  ‘Which is which?’

  ‘H is the man. The woman’s name is probably Abigail but that’s just a guess.’

  ‘Abigail is it?’ He cocked a shrewd eye at her. ‘What’s all this about, Abby?’

  ‘I think they’re my parents, Pete,’ she said. ‘I want to find them.’ He knew the story of her childhood; he was an orphan himself. Both his parents had died on the boat over. He had arrived at Ellis Island in 1820 with nothing but a few dollars and the address of a cousin of his father’s in Milwaukee. He rode the rails out West to find the man, only to learn that he, too, was dead. Eighteen and homeless, O’Hanlon had nowhere to go but the army. He did a three-year hitch and was mustered out at Leavenworth with enough money to get back to New York. He parlayed his military experience into a job as a runner for a reporter and eventually replaced his superior when that worthy was hit by a runaway dray while reporting a fire down on the Lower East Side.’

  ‘Difficult,’ O’Hanlon said, frowning at the locket. ‘There’s probably thousands of people in New York called Bellamy. Always supposing that they live in New York. And since they abandoned you as a child, it’s not likely they’d welcome inquiries now.’

  ‘I know,’ Abby said.

  ‘Give me the date you was picked up in that little park again,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘And we’ll start with that.’

  ‘February twelfth, 1818,’ she said.

  ‘Lord, is it only twenty-six you are?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and went out of the room. She sat and watched the ceaseless activity in the newsroom, men in shirt sleeves smoking cigars, green eyeshades on their foreheads, scribbling away on yellow legal pads, bawling for coffee. She thought it must be very exciting to work on a newspaper. The place smelled of sweat, cigars, damp paper, printing ink. A big fan turning languidly in the center of the ceiling did absolutely nothing to disperse the aromas. After perhaps fifteen minutes, O’Hanlon came back in. His face was grave.

  ‘What is it?’ she said getting up.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Read it for yourself.’

  He was carrying a thick sheaf of newspapers, held together by two wooden battens with wing nuts at either end. He laid them on his desk and heaved over a great sheaf of them to reveal what he had found, a small item at the foot of the front page of the issue for December 6, 1817.

  ABIGAIL BELLAMY A SUICIDE

  The body of Abigail Bellamy, twenty-four, was recovered today from the East River by police. Miss Bellamy, a well-known social figure, was considered by many critics to have a golden future ahead of her
after publication last year of her novel, No Truer Friend. She is survived by her brother Henry, with whom she lived at their elegant town house at 2’ East 3rd Street. Foul play is not suspected.

  Abby stared at the words as though by doing so she could make them answer all the questions seething in her brain. If Abigail Bellamy had been her mother, then she had not been married! That would explain why she had abandoned her baby. But surely, someone like that would have placed the child in a foster home, or seen to it that she was adopted. If she was a writer and a well-known social figure, as the news item stated, it followed that she was an intelligent woman with means. Would such a woman have left her own child on a park bench where it might die of exposure before it was found? It did not seem likely and she said so.

  ‘I know, I know,’ O’Hanlon said. He got his coat off the hook and stuck a cigar at a jaunty angle in his mouth. Abby looked at him.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to take a walk as far as 21 East 3rd Street,’ he said, grinning. ‘You want to come along?’

  The houses on 3rd Street were charmingly elegant. Liveried grooms led horses to the drinking trough at the far end of the street. They rang the bell of the house and a butler with a striped waistcoat opened the door.

  ‘We’d like to speak to Mr. Bellamy,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘Is he in?’

  The butler looked O’Hanlon up and down, priced his suit and smelled his cigar before saying, ‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name here, sir.’ He started to close the door.

  ‘Wait!’ O’Hanlon yelped. ‘Hold on, there! Isn’t this the house of Mr. Henry Bellamy?’

  ‘No, sir, it is not,’ the butler said firmly. He was about to close the door again when a voice, from inside made him turn around.

  ‘Who is it, Dawkins?’

  ‘Someone looking for a Mr. Bellamy, sir,’ the butler said. He made way for a tall, thin man with a patrician face, along the side of whose head lay two swooping wings of white hair.