All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  “No, Marcus.” His mother’s voice was cold now, and he could hear how much she had aged. “God is punishing you.”

  It occurred to Jacob, as their voices faded, that it was the first time he had ever heard his mother say no.

  Most of the time it was Jacob’s mother who stayed at his side, along with one of the remaining servants, whom his mother would direct to reapply his bandages, turn him in his bed, feed him, bathe him, and attend to his most unpleasant needs. Both he and his mother were ashamed of it. When the servant left the room, his mother held his hand and kissed the unburned side of his face. Yet even in those rare instances when the pain ebbed back, all he could see when he looked at her wide lips and her green eyes was the face of Elizabeth Hyams. And when his mother spoke to him, she invariably delivered some sort of awful, damning utterance—something which perhaps wasn’t deliberately designed to extinguish the last remaining embers of his soul, but which inevitably had precisely that effect:

  “Papa and I heard about what Grant did to the Jews in Tennessee, right where you were found. It was in the Jewish newspaper here. An American embarrassment, Papa says. How you could have possibly joined the army of such a man is beyond him, he says. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “I must tell you that it has been rather difficult at the firm since you left. Papa could never find anyone to substitute for you, at least no one who could handle the accounts the way you did. The firm lost half its value in the past year alone. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “David Jonas’s company went bankrupt last summer, and the Jonases put poor Emma in an asylum. David said that you would have been her last chance at a decent existence, but now she’s in the asylum for life. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “Last year I had a letter from Aunt Elisheva—well, ‘Elizabeth,’ as you’d say—after the Union took New Orleans and she could finally write to us again. She’s lost her mind, I’m afraid. Do you remember Uncle Harry? He was always so fond of you. Well, he was murdered by one of his own slaves. Poisoned, at the seder! Can you imagine? Otto Strauss has a nephew in New Orleans and he told me it was true, but if I had only heard it from Elizabeth I’m afraid I wouldn’t have believed her, because in her letter she was clearly hysterical. She wouldn’t stop rambling on about you, of all people. You can’t imagine how upsetting it was for us. She’d had some sort of elaborate delusion that you had come to their house, and that you were in their army, and even that you had a dead wife in Alabama or some other such nonsense. Really it was quite outrageous. At the time we wondered if it might be true somehow, since we didn’t know where you’d gone off to, but once you came back we knew that it made no sense at all, absolutely none. I’m afraid she’s lost her mind completely after Harry’s death. I’ve written to her many times, but I haven’t heard any more from her since then. To think that Harry was murdered! By his own slave! Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

  Even after Jacob was able to speak again, he did not want to. There was simply nothing that he could say.

  Instead he retreated into his own mind, developing imaginary photographs on the blank plate of the ceiling above his bed. During the day he envisioned Abigail and Michael as he had seen them just before they left him behind, kissing through the bars of her cell in the jail. It occurred to him that he had probably only survived the explosion because he had been in the corridor, farther away from the side of the building adjacent to the ammunition stockpile; if Abigail had remained trapped in her cell, she would surely have been crushed to death. But Abigail wasn’t the one who haunted him at night. After his mother and the servants abandoned him each evening, the pain would wake him in the darkness—searing, unforgiving pain. Each time his mind would cower into delirium, and then he would see Jeannie appear on the black expanse of the ceiling, laughing.

  After the wave of pain subsided, he would sometimes allow himself to remember Abigail’s letter, the haunting possibility that it had illuminated for him in the instant before the world exploded. Sometimes, when the night was darkest and the momentary relief from the pain was greatest, he would even permit himself to believe it: that somewhere in the world Jeannie was alive, and waiting for him. In the rarest of such moments, he would fall asleep, freed into the realm of total fantasy, and discover Jeannie lying naked in his bed beside him. He would invariably wake up just before touching her, in sudden and excruciating pain. Abigail’s letter, of course, had been incinerated in the fire, along with the rest of the world as he had once known it. By the end of the first year of his convalescence, he had at last managed to convince himself that the letter had never existed at all.

  After he was finally able to rise from his bed, it took another four months to learn to walk again. Even once he had mastered it, he still could only manage short distances, with the help of a cane. Stairs were a special torture, possible at first only with his mother supporting him. But after what seemed like centuries of agony, a day came when he was able to get out of bed, walk through the house, lower himself down the stairs, and even limp out the front door with nothing but his cane at his side—without collapsing, and with only a deep, dull ache substituting for the searing embrace of pain. It was the eve of Yom Kippur, September 22, 1863, and he went with his father to the synagogue.

  The synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, was in a grand building on Greene Street which had been built when Jacob was six years old. In their prewar religious life, his parents generally preferred the more social events like the annual Purim parties and the Simchas Torah ball, and his father was more likely to be found at the Harmonie Club than in the synagogue. Jacob had even once heard him admit that on ordinary Sabbaths, he occasionally preferred to pay the members’ fine rather than attend. But the synagogue was nonetheless a traditional one, its grandness not intended to outshine the churches in the manner of Temple Emanu-El—the “reformed” congregation that Jacob’s parents enjoyed loathing—but rather simply to outshine the old Spanish–Portuguese synagogue farther downtown. Jacob’s last memory of it was of the high holidays when he was eighteen years old, of listening to the rabbi, Dr. Morris Raphall, give a sermon defending slavery—a long and convoluted exegesis with the unspoken purpose of preserving the union, of preventing a war in which many would die. It sparked a conflagration: it was published in national newspapers, rabbis around the country wrote their own sermons against it, and congregants came close to blows. Jacob’s father had lashed out at the rabbi for it, calling him a charlatan and a fraud, a pretentious British import whom the chief rabbi of London had been snide enough to ship off to the New World as some sort of patronizing joke, a man who knew nothing about liberty or about the country where he had so condescendingly deigned to reside, and now here he was making the whole congregation look like bigots at best and traitors at worst, they who could least afford to be either. His father was so enraged that he ought to have left the congregation for good, but that would have meant forfeiting the pleasure of remaining enraged. It shamed Jacob now to remember how irrelevant the subject had seemed to him when he was eighteen, as if they were arguing about whether people should be permitted to raise chickens on the moon without a kosher butcher. Most Jewish arguments seemed like that to him at the time. He had no idea, then, that those arguments were about how best to be human, about the most trivial and most horrifying obligations involved in repairing a broken world.

  The sanctuary was crowded. Every seat was filled, and the air inside was uncomfortably warm, heavy and burdened by another year of regret. Every man in the room stared at Jacob as he entered the sanctuary, hobbling along at his father’s side, and every last one of them looked away the instant his eyes met Jacob’s, particularly the rich boys whose parents had paid the bounty and bought their way out of the war. Jacob was grateful that they arrived at their assigned seats at nearly the very last minute, so that no one was able to speak to them in the cr
owd. His father pulled him into a standing position as the congregation rose for the annual annulment of future vows between man and God.

  It is meant to be the moment when lives are altered, when one declares one’s failures before the Eternal and tries, by anticipating future failures, to renew a damaged trust. But Jacob knew that no future failures could outweigh what he had already destroyed. The rabbi stood on the platform with two men holding Torah scrolls beside him, and the ceremony began with the traditional announcement: “By the authority of the tribunal above, and by the authority of the tribunal below, we are permitted to pray with sinners.” Jacob understood, as he glanced around the room and saw everyone avoiding his one good eye, that the words referred to him.

  That evening and as the fast continued the following day, he chanted the public confession of sins along with the congregation, the alphabetical litany of crimes against God, and marveled at how many of them he had personally committed. His father didn’t question him when he remained at his side for the memorial service for the dead, attended only by those who have lost parents, children, siblings, or wives. The names of the congregation’s war dead were read aloud, and Jacob saw the dead boys’ parents watching him, burning with envy as he burned with shame. For the entire twenty-five-hour fast, he recited the words in the prayer book, confessed his sins with the congregation again and again, privately begging God for forgiveness, just as he had done in that very same room on every Yom Kippur from when he was thirteen until the war began. But now, for the first time in his life, he felt no relief from it, no unburdening, no answer to his prayers. Usually the end of the fast is an exhilarating moment: an ancient trumpet is sounded, and everyone hurries home happily to food and family, washed clean of their sins. But when the day ended and the gates of repentance had swung shut, Jacob knew that God had not forgiven him, and worse, that he could not forgive himself. He and his father walked out together in a leaden silence. When they sat down to break the fast, Jacob had no appetite. He was twenty years old, and he was an old, old man. The following day he went back to work in his father’s firm, at last admitting defeat.

  During his second long, blank year—the bloody fall and winter and spring as the wretched 1863 turned into the abominable 1864, after he had returned to work, but not to life—he slowly came to understand that there is something perversely appealing about defeat. After one has been beaten enough, Jacob discovered, falling on one’s knees is no longer humiliating. One simply makes a home for oneself groveling on the ground, thrilled to be left as a simpering shell of the person one might have been, relieved at last of the terrible burden of owning one’s own life. Jacob had long accepted this state of affairs when his father came to him, in the autumn of 1864, and unwittingly offered him freedom.

  2.

  “JACOB, THERE’S A CLIENT OF OURS IN PHILADELPHIA WHOM WE ought to meet in person,” his father said one morning in the firm’s office, with a deliberate casualness in his voice.

  Jacob looked up from his desk, where he had been sorting through account books, searching for ways to cut losses. It was the kind of work he had done for Philip Levy, and it felt oddly comforting. His life, if one could call it that, had resumed a sort of tedious routine, the tedium of which was his only source of solace. The fewer people he had to speak to, the calmer he became. With his father he barely spoke at all. His father, too, seemed to prefer it that way, and encouraged his isolation. Usually he even tried to keep Jacob away from the clients, and for that reason, his remark struck Jacob as strange. It was as though he suddenly wanted to include Jacob in the real work of the business, returning him to the person he had been years before. Impossible, Jacob thought. He looked at his father, waiting.

  His father was looking right at him, something he rarely did anymore. “I’m sure the client would be pleased to come to New York, but—well, I wondered if you might be willing to go to Philadelphia to meet him instead,” his father said. Then he winced, as he often did now when doing anything involving Jacob, hiding it by fidgeting with the chain of his watch.

  Jacob watched him carefully as he looked away. Did he mean it? He listened as his father coughed, hesitant. The blond hair on his father’s wrists bristled along his carefully pressed cuffs as his fingers twitched. His whole body seemed to sag, empty and tired. Jacob did not respond. Finally his father looked at him again.

  “I thought it might be an opportunity for you to start developing your own clients,” his father said, with the faintest hint of hope in his voice. His father spoke to him in German—or, as Jacob had been made aware in his occasional contact with “real” Germans, in something closer to the German-Jewish jargon, though Jacob could only vaguely tell the difference. “It would be a short trip, only a few days. Though you might stay longer if you found it necessary.”

  His father was getting rid of him. Jacob was more than ready. “Of course,” he replied, in English. When he was a boy he used to answer his father in German, but he had stopped doing that when he was thirteen years old. Speaking English to his father was something he once associated with being someone different than his father—someone more intelligent, more sophisticated, more American. He had since learned that it was easier simply to meet expectations, to succumb to someone else’s will. He added in German, “Tell me what to do.”

  “Wonderful,” his father said, slapping the desk hard with his palm. It was a gesture he used with clients, usually, at the end of a deal. “I’ll give you all the account information and the correspondence. They’re restructuring their firm, and I would like for us to acquire them as a subsidiary. The head of the firm took on his brother as a partner recently, and I used to work with the brother before the war. He’s the one I’d like you to meet.”

  His father stood, stepping over to the shelves by Jacob’s desk and taking down some account books, rifling through the pages. He paused for a moment, and looked at Jacob. “You may even remember him, from before the war. He used to own P.M.L. Shipping in Virginia. Philip Levy. Do you remember him?”

  Fortunately Jacob’s injuries made it a fairly common occurrence for his father to hear him gasp. He bit his lip and watched as his father tried to hide his own wincing, mistaking Jacob’s astonishment for agony.

  Jacob tried to speak, then choked, and at last managed to relax his face into a bemused frown. “I don’t—I don’t think so,” he stammered.

  His father smiled, satisfied that Jacob’s pain had subsided, and sat down in a chair across from Jacob’s desk. “Levy was my age, but looked younger,” he said. “Tall, dark hair, dark mustache, spectacles, very well-dressed, a bit of a drawl. You really don’t remember him?”

  “No,” Jacob lied. He pictured Philip as he had last seen him, at the jail: stooped in his shackles, his clothes covered in mouse droppings, squinting without his spectacles. Philip was in Philadelphia? But how? He looked at his father, and noticed how his father had glanced away from him, unnerved by what he thought was Jacob’s discomfort. Jacob was only beginning to appreciate how easily a cripple is able to hide.

  “Well, he remembered you,” his father said. “He asked after you in his last letter.”

  “Me?” Jacob nearly gagged on the word. “What did he say?”

  “About you? Oh, nothing, really,” his father replied. “He just said he remembered meeting you at the office a few years ago, and he wondered if you had enlisted. I told him you were wounded and had come home. He sends his condolences.” Jacob’s chest heaved, a sigh of relief that his father clearly assumed was related only to his physical pain. But there was more.

  “In fact, he asked me if he might meet with you, rather than with me. It was his idea,” he heard his father say. “His company in Virginia collapsed, and he’s working with his brother in Philadelphia now. God knows how he managed to cross the lines. I was afraid to ask. That’s another reason why I wanted you to meet him in person. There’s a very small possibility that he and his brother are trying to set up a sham company, to funnel money south. That’
s something a person can’t determine from correspondence. It’s easier to detect lies in the flesh.” His father looked at him carefully, with an expression that might have been an attempt at a grin. “I know you don’t like to talk about your—well, your service, but I suspect that the army gave you a nose for detecting traitors.”

  Jacob’s eye patch was large and distracting enough, along with the various scars on the right side of his face, that it was almost impossible for others to notice when he blushed. He nodded. “You may depend on me,” he said.

  “Wonderful. I shall send you down on the train tomorrow,” his father replied, and left the room.

  Jacob sat back in his seat, his body tingling with the first anticipation he had felt in almost two years: the gleaming possibility of redemption.

  3.

  PHILADELPHIA WAS A POOR MAN’S NEW YORK, RICHER IN INTEGRITY and tradition, and poorer in everything else. The buildings were older and more stately in design, but also smaller and more decrepit; the people were better educated, but less fashionably dressed; the food was worse, but cheaper; the smell of manure in the streets was less intense, but the wait for an omnibus or hansom cab was at least three times as long. When one of the conductors helped Jacob off the train at the station on Broad Street, he looked around and felt strangely at ease, as though he had arrived in the countryside. On that afternoon in early November 1864, the breeze outside the station was chilly, but not yet cold; the trees on the streets, freshly denuded of their leaves, spread their gray branches gently alongside the old tilted brick row houses, and the air smelled of fresh possibilities. He hired a porter to carry his bags to a hotel near the station. After a long, exhausting wait outside the hotel’s front door, during which he was too ashamed to lean against a tree or the hotel’s façade for the support he desperately needed, he at last found a cab to take him to the Board of Brokers, the Philadelphia stock exchange, where he was to meet Philip Mordecai Levy by the entrance at half past three o’clock. He hadn’t taken a cab alone since before the war; after his injury, he almost always had his parents or a servant accompanying him to the few places he might go. But the office hadn’t been able to spare anyone to join him for his trip. Jacob suspected that this was intentional, his father’s secret test for him. He was determined to pass.