by Dara Horn
“Of course. Who else?”
Jacob passed the piece back to her, his heart pounding. “It’s lovely,” he said. “Your work is better than any boy’s I’ve ever seen.” She took the piece and shyly looked back down at it, avoiding Jacob’s eyes as she returned to work. But he could see that she was pleased.
Rose entered the room, ignoring them both as she sat down next to the wooden secretary desk. She helped herself to a charcoal pencil and sheet of paper from the desk, and immediately began scribbling something. Jacob turned back to Phoebe, wondering what more he might be able to learn.
“Do you make things for Miss Charlotte’s gentleman too?” he asked.
“You mean Major Stoughton?” Phoebe grinned. “Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly do it for a Yankee.” She continued whittling.
“Yankee,” Rose muttered from her seat across the room. “Eek, nay!”
Phoebe was clearly accustomed to ignoring Rose’s odd outbursts, and carved without interruption. But Jacob decided to press further. “Doesn’t Miss Charlotte—well, doesn’t she cater to Major Stoughton’s attentions herself?” he pried. He had Phoebe flattered now; he needed to use his chance. “It seems unfair to make something for Mr. Williams but not for Major Stoughton.”
“Who knows what Lottie wants?” Phoebe said, in a tone that made it clear that she herself knew, quite well. Phoebe lacked Jeannie’s acting talent, Jacob noticed. She blew some sawdust off the wood. “Probably not Major Stoughton,” she added, and grinned.
This half-candor was intriguing, but Jacob’s thoughts were soon interrupted by Rose. “Major Tough Tons,” Rose announced, scribbling furiously with her pencil, then scratching something out. “Major sought not. Majors ought not.”
He turned toward where Rose was scribbling. As she continued scribbling, he pictured her nonsense words in his head. All of them spelled Stoughton, he noticed, with the letters rearranged. The girl was a freak of nature. But his goal, he reminded himself, was to win the whole family’s affections; every effort had to be made, even if it meant indulging the inanities of a freakish eleven-year-old girl. “Are you making some sort of puzzle?” he asked innocently.
“Major to gunshot,” Rose replied, without looking up. “Major to shotgun.”
Jacob perceived that this line of inquiry was useless. Phoebe groaned.
At that moment Jeannie entered the room, holding a stocking and some darning thread. When she saw Jacob, she paused, just barely, and then glared at Phoebe. Phoebe rose quickly as Jeannie sat down in a chair next to his.
“I’m going upstairs now,” Phoebe said loudly. “Rose, please join me.”
“Majors ought not,” Rose answered. But she did stand up, carefully rolling up her piece of paper and taking it with her as she followed her sister upstairs. For the first time, Jeannie and Jacob were alone.
“Good evening, Miss Levy,” he said carefully, and allowed himself to admire her. She had been working hard in the kitchen, and it had given her face an almost radiant gleam. He looked at her dress and immediately noticed how the bones of her corset pushed against the worn dark fabric, drawing his eyes up from her waist. The coiled fear in his stomach tightened again, an animal thrill that coursed through his limbs. It was all, he reminded himself, for the cause.
“Good evening, Mr. Rappaport,” she replied, her tone bland, uninviting. “How is business?” she asked.
He wondered what she meant. “Unfortunately it has been much better in the past,” he said delicately. “But your father is a very dedicated man.”
Jeannie threaded her needle and began stitching. “That would be one way to put it,” she said.
The air in the room suddenly felt very warm to him, his chest becoming damp under his shirt and vest as he tried to think of a reply. She seemed to sense him watching her, and she took her time pulling the thread through the fabric. This gave him time to observe her at close range, imagining the wonders hidden beneath her dress. In the days since he had met her, she seemed only to become more stunning. Her lips, he saw, were perfect. But then she spoke again.
“We are all rather curious about you, Mr. Rappaport,” she announced, still stitching. “Tell me: why aren’t you still in New York?”
The question alarmed him. He bit his lip, admiring the curve of her body as she leaned over the stocking in her lap. She hadn’t looked up at him. “What do you mean?” he finally asked.
“Well,” she replied, “you are clearly a gentleman with many opportunities. Papa says that you are brilliant with numbers.” The phrase settled into Jacob’s gut like stale bread. “You’ve apparently saved us from imminent bankruptcy.”
Was it true? Jacob thought of the financial disaster he had discovered in Philip’s office and knew that he had done nothing more than bail some water out of a sinking ship. Yet he saw no reason to disabuse her of the idea. “I did what I could,” he said, trying to sound modest. “But your father deserves most of the credit.”
She glanced at him, skeptical, then looked back at her needle. “Papa also says that your father is one of the most brilliant businessmen he’s ever met, and that he’s fabulously successful. Hobnobbing with British bankers and so forth,” she said. “Supposedly you all live in grand style over there. And without any armies at your doorstep either.” She said this last sentence with great contempt, as though Jacob personally embodied an army at her doorstep. He understood that he did. “I’m sure that in New York you spend all your nights at glamorous balls, and that beautiful young ladies are tripping over each other to marry you. Even if you wanted to have some sort of adventure as a smuggler or a speculator, your father probably could have bought you a whole plantation here for a pittance. Certainly you had no need to stay in a boarding house. Especially an inelegant one like ours, without a single slave. None of us can make head or tail of why you’re here.”
This frightened him. Did she somehow suspect him? He thought carefully and chose to tell the truth, or at least something close to it. He braced a hand against his knee.
“My father and I are no longer on speaking terms,” he said.
She looked up at him, startled. Her brown eyes focused on him, and for the first time he saw her seeing him, instead of waiting to be seen. When she spoke, her voice was different, more natural, its arrogance dissipated into the warm air in the room. “Why not?” she asked.
“We had a disagreement,” he said.
Now she was interested, he saw. She put down her needle and leaned toward him in a remarkably unladylike posture, planting her palms against her knees. His own mother would have considered her crass, he thought. But he was enchanted. As she leaned forward, he caught a glimpse, beneath the neckline of her dress, of the upper edge of her corset, and the sweet slender ache of a shadow between her breasts. “What sort of disagreement?” she asked.
“About a—a lady,” he answered. “He wanted me to marry her.”
“I see,” she said, leaning back. The shadow disappeared. “And you said no.”
“Not exactly. I just left.”
She considered him, twirling a dark lock of hair around a finger. “Why didn’t you simply say no?” she asked. “Then you could have stayed there, and continued hobnobbing with British bankers and the like.”
“It wasn’t a choice,” he replied. “It was a matter of obligation.”
She drew her thin eyebrows together, as if trying to solve a puzzle. “Obligation to whom?” she asked. He was amazed by how interested she was, how the pretense had drained from her voice. “To your father, or to the lady?”
“To everyone.”
“To everyone but yourself,” she said.
An unease crept into Jacob’s body. He had never allowed himself to think of it that way. But Jeannie was still curious. “Did your mother want you to marry her, too?” she asked.
This was more than Jacob wanted to think. Picturing his mother meant picturing Elizabeth Hyams. But Jeannie was watching him, her dark eyes on his. He imagined leaning toward her, takin
g hold of her waist, her hair, her breasts. “I suppose she did,” he said.
“But did she say so?”
Her boldness took him by surprise, and so did the question. His mother rarely said anything in the presence of his father. She had been only seventeen years old when his father imported her from Bavaria, and she had known no one in America but him. It pained her to have produced only one child who lived past infancy. In lieu of worrying about children she didn’t have, she worried about the business, about the house, about their friends, about doing her very best to ensure that everyone was enjoying all of their hard-earned bounty as much as possible. His father spoke to her lovingly in front of other people, but Jacob had heard him shout at her in private. With his father she was deferential, diffident, at his mercy. More than once, Jacob had discovered her hiding in some obscure corner of the house, her carefully powdered face blotched and streaked with tears. Each time she told him that soot was irritating her eyes, that something must be done about the chimneys.
“No,” he answered. “But I never heard my mother say no to my father.”
Jeannie laughed. “I never heard my father say no to my mother,” she said. “She always acted quite ladylike in public, but there was no question of who was in charge.”
Jacob laughed along with her, marveling at how honest she seemed, how willing to talk and to listen. In her laughter he heard something close to friendship, the first friendliness he had encountered since his talk with Mendoza the previous year, on that lonely night. He decided to encourage her candor.
“Surely you’ve had disagreements with your father too, from time to time,” he said.
Now Jeannie hesitated. She picked up the stocking again, and blinked. Several long seconds passed before she spoke.
“My father and I disagree about nearly everything,” she said.
He saw how her eyes turned away from him, and wondered how he could bring them back. “He’s always seemed rather accommodating to me,” he tried.
“Of course,” she replied, her voice arching into a slight sneer. “Philip Mordecai Levy would never dream of upsetting an important merchant from New York. It’s only his own daughters he can’t speak to.”
Jacob watched as she rethreaded the needle, moistening the end of the thread with the tip of her tongue. She slipped the wet thread through the needle’s eye. His body shuddered, plucked like a string on a harp.
“Papa was one of the last people in town to stop doing business with the North,” she said. “My sisters and I found it rather revolting, considering what happened to our mother.”
Jacob sensed that he shouldn’t ask anything more. But he couldn’t help himself. “What do you mean?”
Now she looked back at him, her sneer vanished. Her voice dropped. “You mean you don’t know?” she asked.
Jacob looked at her, confused. “I suppose I don’t.”
She glanced at him once more, then looked back down at the stocking. A long moment passed before she spoke. “We used to keep slaves in the house,” she finally said, her voice strangely still. “One of them was an old woman who took care of my sisters and me when we were small.” She put the stocking down on her lap, though she continued looking at it, rather than at him. “One day she went out to tend to the garden, and she came back into this room holding Papa’s shotgun. She started cursing some tribe that had sold her mother in Africa, and then she screamed that our parents were devils—the ‘carnation of evil.’ That was what she said.” Jeannie paused. “If you look at the south side of the room by the door, you can see where we patched the wall. Papa was barely able to get the gun away from her before she killed anyone else.”
Jacob glanced at the wall next to the door and noticed a small swath of paint that was a slightly darker shade of green than the wall around it. He stared at it in disbelief. Jeannie would have been eleven years old at the time. Surely she had misremembered it somehow, or was recalling it secondhand. But Jeannie wasn’t finished.
“And Papa freed them,” she said, with the slightest quaver in her voice. “Can you imagine? The old woman was hanged, but there were two other slaves in the house who knew all about what she was planning. They must have. Papa didn’t even sell them off. He just set them free. Lottie was thirteen then, and she hasn’t respected him since.”
Jacob breathed in. Against every element of his upbringing, he didn’t offer his condolences, or even try to say anything comforting. Instead he glanced again at the patch on the wall across the room and asked her, “Did you see it happen?”
She looked at him, and for the first time he saw she was serious. Without her laughter, her eyes had a firm and terrifying power.
“All of us saw it,” she said.
And then Lottie came in, and the two sisters hurried upstairs.
5.
JACOB BEGAN TO NOTICE THAT HE AND JEANNIE WERE BEING LEFT alone more often by her sisters, particularly when their father was out. At first it appeared to be coincidence: Jacob would enter the front room in the evening, and Phoebe and Rose would immediately remember that they had some cooking for the next day to be done in the kitchen that couldn’t possibly wait. On other nights it was Lottie who vacated the room, announcing that she had forgotten to refill the lamps upstairs or to take the laundry in from outside when it looked like it might rain. Jeannie and Lottie still had their little cabals, of course, racing up the stairs together after William Williams or Major Stoughton had departed, but on evenings when neither appeared, Jacob found himself alone with Jeannie again and again. Each time she was curious, eager, asking him questions about his life in New York, speaking to him more than any woman had ever spoken to him before. He answered her, startled by the warmth of her words, by how welcoming she was, by how, for the first time in years, he suddenly felt at home.
“Did you often go to the theater in New York, Mr. Rappaport?” she asked one evening, after Philip and Lottie had gone out and Rose and Phoebe had hurried upstairs.
“Of course,” he replied, though the memory was unpleasant. Each time his parents had brought him to the theater, he had the distinct sense that they were there not to see the plays, but to be seen by the other people in the audience, as though they themselves were the ones onstage. Yet there was something about speaking with Jeannie now that set him at ease, as though his entire former life were nothing more than a vaguely remembered dream. He continued to search her words and gestures for some sign that would reveal her inherent evil. Instead, to his astonishment, he had found a friend.
“What was the best performance you ever saw?” she asked.
Jacob hesitated. Surely he ought to name something by Shakespeare, if he were to impress her. But instead he found himself telling the truth. “A hypnotist,” he said.
Jeannie glanced at him, her smile descending into a smirk. “I saw one of those a few years ago,” she said. “It seemed quite clear to me that the volunteers were all arranged in advance.”
“My father felt the same way, and he wanted to prove that it was all a trick,” Jacob said. “But he was afraid that the hypnotist would mock his accent in front of everyone if he were to volunteer, so he told me to volunteer instead.”
Jeannie watched him. Her fingers moved along the armrest of her chair, and for an instant Jacob wondered if she wanted to reach for his hand. “How old were you?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” he replied. “I raised my hand, because I was sure I wouldn’t be chosen. But before I knew it, I was onstage.”
“So was it real?” Jeannie asked. Her tone was genuine; he saw how her eyebrows rose, her body angled gently toward his.
“Well, I decided that I would pretend to be hypnotized, just to prove my father wrong,” he said. Jeannie smiled, and he felt emboldened, honest. “My father doubts everyone, you see. He reserves his faith for God. He’s never trusted another person.”
“My father is like that too,” Jeannie said. “At least, he’s never trusted me.”
Jacob considered this remark, and w
ondered what it might mean. But her hair was coming loose again, and with a brush of her hand across her exquisite forehead, his thoughts of her father dissolved. “My father’s lack of faith is quite extreme,” he said. “He always assumes that everyone is trying to exploit him or humiliate him, or even to destroy him. I suppose that was what happened to him before he came to America, and he never changed. I wanted to make him believe in something.”
“By deceiving him yourself,” Jeannie said with a grin.
“Yes,” Jacob admitted. The air was cool in the room that evening, cleansed and fresh from the afternoon’s gentle rain. “But the strange thing was that it turned out to be quite real. The man really did hypnotize me.”
Jeannie squinted at him, skeptical. “How do you know?”
“Because he made me sing onstage, and I never would have sung in public out of my own free will.”
“What did you sing?”
“‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Jeannie laughed. But Jacob remembered that night and felt a swell of strange pride. His plan had failed twice over, he had discovered when he returned to his seat in the audience: his father didn’t believe he had been hypnotized, and assumed Jacob had simply played along. But to his astonishment, his father was proud of him. For months afterward, he heard his father boasting of how his son had stood up in front of hundreds of real American strangers to sing the national anthem. And Jacob was secretly proud of it too: thrilled by how he had been freed, for that fleeting moment onstage and away from his parents’ accents, from any reason to be ashamed. The memory of it made him feel lighter than air, his limbs cool and weightless as he admired Jeannie’s body in the chair beside his. He listened as Jeannie launched into stories from her acting career, and caught himself feeling happier than he had felt in years.
But the next day the message from the bakery demanded to know how long the command would have to wait for a wedding, or at least more definitive information. And when Jeannie was alone with him again in the front room that night, telling him how she once ran off to Richmond for a week to play the lead in Romeo and Juliet, he knew he could no longer wait.