by Dara Horn
She was about to brush by, but he thrust one arm in front of her, blocking her path, and angled his cane in front of her feet. She stopped.
His heart pounded, but she didn’t look at him. Of course not; no one ever did. He watched as she reached into the pocket of the apron tied around her waist and fished something out. Without looking at him, she pressed it into his palm. When he glanced down at his hand, he was surprised to see that it was a ten-dollar Rebel bill, until he remembered that the money had become almost worthless. “Now, sir, a war is won,” she said with a smile, and began to walk away.
For an instant he gazed at her, enjoying the strange and delectable taste of a memory long forgotten. He marveled at how an old routine could be recalled so physically, so unthinkingly: he heard Rose’s little palindrome as though it were a smell. He couldn’t let his life pass by again. He balanced himself on his cane with one hand and seized her by the arm.
She stopped, caught. Her thin arm felt fragile in his grip, like the wing of a little bird. His heart fluttered; he hadn’t touched a woman in over two years, other than his mother. And how close he was to Jeannie now, how agonizingly close!
Rose turned and glanced at him, then quickly looked away, watching his hand clutching the worn sleeve of Jeannie’s old dress. Jacob felt that familiar sleeve against his fingers and almost took her whole body in his arms, swooning from mere memory. But he held himself steady, clutching her, a slow ache seeping into his locked knees. Rose looked at him again, and then fixed her gaze on the ground. All she had seen was his eye patch.
“I don’t have any more money, sir,” she said. Her voice was higher than it had been before, weaker. He could hear how she tried to keep her words firm, and failed. “Really, it’s true. I have nothing more to give you. I’m—I’m—I’m sorry, sir. Please—please let me go.”
The sidewalk where they were standing was becoming too crowded, with too many people jostling them; he couldn’t speak to her there. He glanced to his left and saw a narrow alley. With agonizing pain pulsing through his legs, he moved as quickly as he could. He clutched her arm in one hand and his cane in the other, and then pulled her around the corner until she was facing him, her back to the alley’s brick wall. She gasped, of course, a cry smothered by shock, but no one heard her. If any of the chivalrous gentlemen on the street saw a disfigured cripple accosting a pretty young lady and dragging her into an alley, they gave no notice.
Now Rose was standing before him, her whole narrow body trapped, braced against the brick wall between his left hand and his cane. He looked at her face and saw the absolute terror in her eyes. He recognized that fear from every place he had seen it, imagined it, and lived it—from Dorrie at the slave auction, from Jeannie on the floor at their wedding, from old Isaacs telling him about his first wife, from the moment he was ordered to his knees at Solomon’s Inn, and the moment he first stood before the tribunal in Washington: the frightening instant when you realize that your life depends entirely on someone else’s whim.
“Please, sir, please,” she begged, and looked down at the bag of potatoes that she was still clutching in her hands. “Take the potatoes. You may have them all,” she said, her words a desperate blur as she dropped the bag on the ground at his feet. “Please, only let me go.”
“I don’t want your money or your food,” he said.
She looked up at him, judging. In the light of her dark brown eyes he recognized a depth of beauty that he hadn’t even remembered, Jeannie’s beauty. He smiled at her, startled to find himself on the verge of tears. But his face was a hideous mask, and she misunderstood his smile. She panicked, and tried to duck, nearly slipping out from under his arms. He panicked in turn, and braced his cane against her waist, pushing her back against the wall. Just as she began to open her mouth to scream, he touched her shoulder with his hand, and to his shock she didn’t flinch.
“Rose Levy,” he said. “Don’t you recognize me?”
She started at her name, and shuddered in horror. At length she looked at the scars on his cheek below his eye patch. She began to shake her head. But then he perceived the precise moment when she looked at the unscarred side of his face, stared into his remaining eye, and knew.
“A parrot’s pappy,” she breathed. RAPPAPORT, A SPY.
Now Jacob was the one who was frightened. Suddenly he felt the full weight of where they were, of what it meant: a fourteen-year-old girl in the enemy’s capital knew precisely who he was, and could give him away to absolutely anyone. There was no longer any way to return. But he had to risk everything. “Rose, please, tell me,” he said, swallowing his own desperation whole. “Is Jeannie still alive?”
Rose stood still. Finally she spoke.
“I won’t tell you anything,” she said, glaring at his remaining eye. Her face was a mask, revealing no emotion. “You destroyed us.”
This reply electrified him, leaving him pulsing both with thundering despair and lightning bolts of irrational hope. He gathered his strength.
“Rose, listen to me,” he said. He glanced behind him. The street was still crowded; at any moment his unchivalrous position might be noticed, or Rose might suddenly call for help. “I have a message for you, from your father.”
Her stoic mask seemed to fall to the ground, revealing the little girl he had known, long ago. “From Papa?”
He nodded. “He asked me to find you.”
She bit her lip, her eyes wide. She was on the brink of tears. He looked at her dark eyes, Jeannie’s eyes, and knew how close he was. He saw his chance and seized it.
“I want to help you, Rose,” he told her. “I know that your family needs help. But I need you to tell me about Jeannie.”
“Doom an evil deed, liven a mood,” she intoned.
This was excruciating, both mentally and physically. His legs were beginning to buckle. He lowered his cane to the ground and pressed his other arm against the wall, putting his weight on his hands. “Rose, I’m begging you,” he pleaded. “I can give you anything you want. I have money, I have food. I can contact your father for you. Only speak to me.”
She blushed, looking down at the ground. “Never, even,” she said.
The maddening word puzzles continued even now. In the time he had known the Levy girls, he had never thought about Rose’s motivation for her odd obsession. He had simply considered it yet another Levy eccentricity, on a par with Lottie’s broken engagements or Phoebe’s boyish whittling or Jeannie’s sleight of hand. It was only now that he saw how clearly it served a purpose, the same purpose that all of the girls’ idiosyncrasies served. It was a way of digging an impassable ditch between themselves and others, a mined trench of protection for those who had seen the wreckage that could be inflicted upon the heart.
“Rose, I know you loved your mother, even if you hardly knew her,” he said slowly. “I know you love your father. I know you love your sisters. And I know what you think I did to your family.” She was watching him now, a knot of anger loosening between her dark eyebrows. “But I haven’t stopped thinking of your family for the past two years,” he said. “I freed your father from prison. I even freed your cousin Abigail from jail in Mississippi, when the army detained her.” These claims were too simple to be precisely true, but they were the only deeds he had—his feeble, best attempts at redeeming captives. He watched Rose, wondering how much of this she knew. Very little, it seemed.
“Look at me, Rose,” he said. “You can’t be afraid of me anymore. You can run away, and I can’t run after you. Look where we are. Think of who I am. You are safe here. I am not. You can send me off to the gallows any time you’d like. But I came here for you and your sisters, because I promised your father that I would find you.” He paused, a dull lump of pain throbbing behind his missing eye. Rose was examining him now, inspecting his eye patch, his legs, his cane. “I don’t expect your forgiveness, Rose,” he said at last. “All I can ask for is your mercy. I love your sister, and I always will. Please just tell me if she’s alive
.”
He watched as little Rose, Philip’s treasure, cracked before his eyes. She didn’t weep, of course. She was Philip’s daughter, too smart and too proud. Instead he saw how her face softened, her breath slowing as she began to think.
“Could you send my father a letter for me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
For the first time in two years, Jacob saw Rose smile, a Levy smile, like her sister’s. The beauty in that smile was unfathomable, almost unreal.
“I shall write it this evening and bring it to you,” she said, her voice full of joy. “Shall I find you here tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” he said. “But only if you tell me—”
But she was wriggling now, edging her way out of where he had braced her against the wall. He tried to stop her, but he had been standing too long; he no longer had the strength. He held her wrist, and she looked at him. “Please let me go,” she finally said. “I shall come back tomorrow, I promise. But I must go now. I’m expected.”
Should he believe her? “Where are you going?” he asked.
She shrank down into herself, her shoulders rising as she bowed her head. She looked back at him, and he saw that she had caved in completely, that he had succeeded in breaching the deep trench of distrust. “I have to go home. My aunt isn’t well, and I have to stay with Deborah.”
The name was familiar to him, though at first he couldn’t place it. It was someone in the Levy family—a cousin he had met at the wedding, in that hour before William Williams arrived? Then he remembered where he had seen the name Deborah: on the gravestone in the cemetery, where he had held Jeannie for the last time. Now he was confused, absurdly imagining Rose guarding their mother’s grave.
“Who is Deborah?” he asked.
Rose swallowed, and looked down at her own feet. “Jeannie’s daughter,” she said.
Jacob stood still, stunned. The beauty of the world lay revealed before him, a tantalizing glimpse at a vast continent of happiness just beyond reach. He couldn’t even begin to imagine her—her, a daughter!
“Rose,” he gasped. “I need to meet her.” He gripped her thin arm. “And I need to see Jeannie.” To see Jeannie! The words washed through his shameful life like a cleansing rain. “Please, Rose, take me home with you.”
Rose shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
For an instant he thought this was her defiance again, and he wondered why she hadn’t used some sort of word puzzle to express it. He saw how her face was tightening, her little-girl eyebrows furrowing back into worry and grief.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Because of Lottie,” Rose said. “If she sees you, she’ll have you killed. She said she would, if she ever sees you again.”
He thought of what Philip had said about how Lottie had looked when they were exchanged: She was so angry, so full of fury. I almost didn’t recognize my own child. But now he was the one who wouldn’t recognize his own child.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I need to meet—I need to meet Deborah.” He tasted the name in his mouth, imagining a little dark-eyed, dark-haired, miniature Levy girl. Jeannie’s daughter. “And I need to see Jeannie.” He allowed himself to think the words: My wife. My daughter. My family.
“I can’t,” Rose repeated. “I won’t.”
It occurred to Jacob that it wasn’t his fate that Rose cared about, but rather her own. If Lottie discovered him and had him hanged, then Rose wouldn’t be able to write to her father—and the war might continue for another thirty years, and she might never hear from him again. Rose was in Lottie’s thrall now, her prisoner. Their home was a citadel within a citadel, and he would have to find his own way in.
He noticed an almost imperceptible crack in the fortress wall. “Why are you watching the baby?” he asked. “Where is Jeannie?”
Rose pursed her lips, looking down. As he waited for Rose to answer, he imagined that his joy had been misplaced, that he had been terribly mistaken, that Jeannie—
At last Rose spoke. “A few months ago Jeannie found a—a position. She’s supporting all of us now. Even Phoebe and her mother-in-law.”
Phoebe was married? He remembered Phoebe too as more girl than woman, engrossed in her whittling, laughing with the guests at his wedding. But he couldn’t think of Phoebe now; all he could think of was Jeannie. And Deborah.
“A ‘position’?” he asked. “What sort of ‘position’?”
Rose wouldn’t look back up at him. “She works in the evenings, and I look after Deborah,” she said.
This was a childish evasion, and he wouldn’t accept it. He stared at Rose, suddenly nauseated. Had Jeannie become some sort of—some kind of—
“Where does she work?” he demanded. “How can I see her?”
Rose shook her head. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
He stood still, stricken. With a gravity that pulled at his weakened knees, he suddenly understood that this must be true. But he could not let it matter to him, not now. “Tell me where she works,” he demanded again.
“She doesn’t want to see you. She hates you.”
He flinched, cringing from the blow. She hates you. It was entirely possible. Probable, even. But he had come too far. “I don’t care. I want to see her. Tell me where she works.”
“No.”
He clutched Rose’s wrist, his tight grip brushing the edge of cruelty. “Rose, do you want me to send that letter to your father? If you ever want to hear from your father again—”
Rose finally looked up, and he saw in her eyes the flaw in the fortress wall, the crack widening. “She wouldn’t want you to know,” she said.
“Why?” he asked, though he was afraid of the answer. “Is it—is it something shameful?”
“No,” Rose said simply. He breathed with relief. Rose added, with a Levy smile, “It would only be shameful for you.”
He looked at her, baffled. “Shameful for me?”
Rose couldn’t help herself anymore; the citadel was breached. She grinned as she pulled a folded piece of paper out of her apron pocket, which she then passed to him.
He unfolded it, expecting some sort of letter. But he soon saw that it was a printed advertisement—or, rather, an invitation. The ink had blurred along the creases where Rose had folded it, but the text was still eminently clear:
You are Cordially Invited to Attend
The Cary Sisters’ Starvation Ball
WITH ENTERTAINMENTS BY
The One-Legged Orchestra
AND
The Acclaimed
Miss Eugenia Van Damme,
PERFORMING AS
“The Escape Artist.”
Prepare to be ASTOUNDED!!
30 MARCH, EIGHT O’CLOCK
AT THE CARY RESIDENCE, 23 CLAY STREET
“REFRESHMENTS” WILL BE SERVED!
**Donations accepted at the door**
for Chimborazo Hospital
He read the words on the page, utterly bewildered. At last he spoke.
“Van Damme?” he asked.
Rose smiled. “It’s the name she used in the theater, before the war.” Of course. He had wondered, a lifetime ago, how she had managed to have such a successful theater career with a name like Levy. “She was famous here,” Rose added. “People remember her.”
He looked at the invitation again. “What is a starvation ball?” he asked.
“It’s the fashion here. The society people hold grand parties just like before the war, but with empty plates instead of food. Everyone thinks it’s great fun.”
He thought of the Passover seder in New Orleans, of the drunken cheering for the cause. It was a land of delusion, a glorious, ridiculous dream. He read the advertisement once more, hypnotized. “The Escape Artist.” Of course, of course! He would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so stunned. Rose was right: it was only shameful for him.
“She performs everywhere now. This week she is occupied with rehearsals for another performance, but thi
s one is next Thursday night,” Rose said through the haze of his thoughts, pointing to the date. “No one will stop you from going in, if you are dressed appropriately enough,” she told him. “They are always eager for more gentlemen. Stay in the back of the room. She won’t recognize you from a distance. But you must not let her see you there.”
She plucked the paper out of his hand. He tried to grab it back from her, until he saw that she was tucking it into his own vest pocket. “I shall come back tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, with a letter for Papa,” she said, and smiled. “If you aren’t here, you may expect to be hanged.”
With that, she bent down, picked up her sack of potatoes, and darted away. He would have followed her, but she was much too fast for him. He watched her as she disappeared around a corner, and then he sank down to the ground, his legs buckling under the weight of newfound wonder. He read the invitation once more, and marveled at the revival of the dead.
3.
THE NEXT MORNING, ROSE GAVE HIM HER LETTER FOR PHILIP, without a word. Once she had left, he opened it, in case it was some sort of trick. Inside he found pages of scenes, some rendered in anagrams, but most in painfully direct prose, describing everything the sisters had endured in the past two years: the death of Phoebe’s husband in the battle at Spotsylvania; how the baby Phoebe had been expecting was born too soon and died; their aunt’s illness; Rose’s job as a hospital orderly; Phoebe’s promotion to hospital matron; Lottie’s raving fury since her release. She breaks things, Rose wrote. Of Jeannie, out of fear, she offered only one cryptic sentence: Miss Van Damme has returned to the stage, and thanks to her efforts we are no longer hungry. A single line toward the end of the letter made him unable to read any more: Deborah will be two years old at the end of May, and I regret to say that she looks exactly like her father. He returned the letter to the envelope, blinking his remaining eye. That evening, he brought it, with special delivery instructions, to the cobbler.