Belle Cora: A Novel Page 38

  She started for the door, but I didn’t follow her. I grabbed a pretty little Windsor chair with a red-and-yellow flower-print cushion tied to the seat, and I sat in it and pointed to another just like it. With a wary expression, she lowered herself into the chair. “Tell me,” I said. “What is it? It’s about Agnes? And George Sackett? And what else?” Suddenly my heart was beating as if I had just run a race. “And Jeptha?”

  She watched me for a little longer, then shook her head, put her hand over her mouth, and moved it over her eyes.

  “My father killed himself when I was nine,” I reminded her. “Everyone in New York tried to hide it from me. They wanted to spare my feelings, but I was bound to learn. It was left for Agatha to tell me, and it was worse for me that way. I know you love me, Anne. I can hear it from you. You are the best person to tell me. Tell me.”

  I waited, and at last she said: “I was going to tell you if I thought it would be any use. If you—if your shop was really a dress shop. Now it’s just going to hurt you, but here it is. Jeptha was here for William Jefferds’s funeral, and we asked after his wife. It turned out she had died the year before. It was the first we’d heard about it. And Agnes was there; and she told him—she told us—that George Sackett had consumption and was unable to go to California, and they had parted company. And we learned by letter a few weeks after, Agnes and Jeptha are engaged, and they’re going to California. At least, they want to. The missionary society that was backing George Sackett and Agnes went ahead and sent another couple. Jeptha and Agnes are both eager to go, and now Jeptha and Agnes are looking for another sponsor.”

  “I see,” I said, feeling as if I had been hit by a giant hammer, and I knew I was just beginning to feel it. “Yes, I can see why you might have hesitated to tell me all that. Well, well, Agnes and Jeptha. Agnes and Jeptha at last.”

  I put my head in my hands, suffering, but in the middle of it doing some thinking, because I knew I had to make the best use of my time alone with Anne, and I asked: “When did she tell you that George Sackett had consumption and they had parted ways? Was it before Jeptha said his wife was dead, or after?”

  “I don’t know; I wasn’t there. I only learned it from Agatha. I see what you’re saying, but what does it matter? Anyway, what’s the use? Arabella, even if it weren’t for Agnes, after what you’ve told me, don’t you see it’s too late?”

  “Didn’t you just say the opposite?”

  “Too late for you and Jeptha.”

  I put my head in my hands again. Anne got up from her chair and put her arms around me. She said, “When we met him a few days after the funeral, he said he had wronged you; he’d been wrong about you. I don’t know what he meant by it, he wouldn’t say. I don’t think he knows how much he wronged you.”

  AFTER WE LEFT, I HAD TOBY DRIVE us in the direction of Livy, and at a certain landmark I had him halt and let me out. Monique and Jocelyn followed me when I walked off the road and through the woods, to a hill overlooking the Muskrat Pond. I came to a beech tree on whose thick, silvery branches Jeptha had once stood, preaching his first sermons to me, and then to the meadow where we had fondled each other at the risk of damnation. Nothing here had changed. Five autumns had stripped the trees, five winters had frozen the ground and six springs had thawed it, while my aunt awaited the end of time and I sent Jeptha letters that he never answered, and I became a millworker, a maid, a whore, and a woman who lived off the earnings of whores, and had a baby, and gave him away.

  A breeze made a noisy rustle in the leaves and combed the pond; reflections of trees and grass were split and pulled apart like a deck of cards being reshuffled; and a squirrel with an acorn looked my way, as if trying to place me. I stood there, remembering and ruing, and then I walked back and told Toby to turn the carriage around.

  XXXVIII

  ON THE RETURN TRIP, MONIQUE AND JOCELYN were respectfully silent, permitting me to concentrate. I stared out of the window at the buds on the apple trees. There were so many new facts, and they kept coming at me like breathless messengers, bringing dispatches from different parts of a chaotic battle.

  He said he had wronged you, Anne had told me. He’d been wrong about you. What could he have meant by that? It had to mean that he believed me at last. He knew I had not been unfaithful to him. I had told him in my letters about Matthew. For some reason, five and a half years ago he had not believed me. For some reason, now he did. Agnes’s part in my ruin he could not know, surely, or he would not be with her.

  I thought until my head hurt. When we reached Albany, I put Jocelyn on a stage to Boston, where she was to act as my spy, helping me to find Agnes, Jeptha, and George Sackett, if they were really in that city, and to discover what she could about their real circumstances.

  For what I was about to attempt, no plan would be good enough. Any plan would be overtaken by events. If I won, I would do it by putting myself in the path of opportunities and taking advantage of those that came my way.

  Too late, Anne had said, only wishing me well. But she did not really know me anymore. She did not know the resources I had at my disposal, the risks I was willing to take, and how far I was willing to go.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK, I arranged for a wonderful coincidence to occur.

  Walking along Fourth Street, I captured the attention of a slim, handsome, rather smug-looking young man with a silk hat and white kid gloves. I recognized him immediately. He noticed the look of inquiry and wonder on my face; interested, he stopped and smiled. “Can I be of assistance?”

  I stared at him for another second. “Robert?”

  “Yes. I—”

  “Robert Godwin?”

  “Do we know each other?” he asked. He was still a bachelor. He began to flirt. “I think I have a tolerable memory. Could it have deteriorated so much as to allow me to forget so lovely a face?”

  “Oh, Robert,” I said, genuinely moved, even though I had worked very hard to arrange this chance encounter. I had waited on this street, which I had studiously avoided ever since I learned from Lewis that Robert belonged to the Union Club, whose front door was twenty feet from where we stood. “Robert, look at me.”

  Curiosity gave way to astonishment. “It can’t be.”

  “It is.”

  “Arabella?”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  We embraced, then walked arm in arm to a nearby restaurant, and I told him, very selectively, about Livy and Cohoes, and how, since leaving the mill, I had become a dressmaker with a shop of my own on Grand Street, which he declared that he had passed a hundred times. I had probably been busy with pins and measuring tape, a matter of yards away! But men seldom enter such shops. He told me about the fall and rebirth of our grandfather’s affairs, and his own—Robert’s—career as an attorney at law, and—oh, wait, hang on to my hat—he told me that in finding him not only had I also found Edward and our grandparents, but I had also found Lewis! Yes, it was true, Lewis had chanced into renewed contact with the family before I had! He was in a boarding school, the same that Edward and Robert had gone to after our mother died.

  “It’s like a dream,” I said. “It’s like a wonderful happy ending in a book.”

  It was not necessary for me to feign strong feelings.

  At Robert’s insistence, we took a hack north up Broadway, all the way to Bloomingdale—where, according to the maps that the Corporation had already drawn, 100th Street would be one day. We passed farms, and country stores, and ponds whose surfaces were stroked by weeping willows. “There it is,” said Robert, about a big house with a white-columned portico: it was the house my grandfather had purchased two years ago and had been living in all this time. “Just wait,” he said, and put his hand over mine, obviously thrilled to be reunited with his baby sister.

  As the hack turned onto the gravel road to a house I had never set my eyes on before, I blinked back tears. Robert put his arm around my shoulders and watched me, smiling, thinking he knew what was in my heart, but of course he couldn
’t know. Even if the facts were put before him, he couldn’t know. I felt as if I were coming home at last. I felt as if all that was broken could be fixed. If anyone could do it, my grandfather could. All the indelible stains could be washed clean.

  At the same time, I knew it was false and dangerous. I would have to be vigilant with myself. I wasn’t here to be made right. I couldn’t be made right.

  To the elderly servant who met us at the door, Robert said, “Tell Mr. Godwin to consult the health of his heart before coming down to greet us; this young lady and I have a great though very pleasant shock for him and for Mrs. Godwin.”

  We waited in a comfortable drawing room. A vase with daffodils stood on the lid of a piano near a window; Robert idly turned the stool a few times, sat, squinted at the sheets on the music stand, and made straight bars of shadow appear and wink out as his fingers pressed the sleek rods of wood and ivory. The notes were tinny. The rhythm was halting. Never had a piece of music moved me so. I reminded myself that he had not answered a single one of my letters when I was in Livy. I supposed my grandfather had told him not to. He ought to have disobeyed.

  There were footsteps, and Robert turned to an archway that opened to the hall; I looked in that direction, too.

  My grandfather, who looked much older, of course, after twelve years, was smiling broadly when he came in. I believe he assumed that Robert had brought home a prospective bride, and the presence of a young woman of suitable age and appearance doubtless seemed to confirm the impression.

  “Don’t tell him,” Robert instructed me. “See if he can guess.”

  This showed my grandfather that something else was afoot. He looked at me a few seconds, walked up to look closer. “Can it be?” he inquired. “Is it?”

  “Say it,” Robert commanded him.

  “Arabella?” he said. I nodded. His old eyes welled with tears, and he enfolded my soft young hands within his hands, which had the cracked translucency that mine have today. He brought my fingers to his lips; then he released them, and his arms enfolded me. “Oh, what a providence it is.” He gazed into my eyes with a tenderness that made me forget the countless times I had cursed him for abandoning me, and I began to tremble and sob. “It’s a miracle, a miracle.”

  He pulled a chair over to the couch, and we sat, leaning toward each other, while he had us narrate the story of our chance meeting on West Fourth Street. He asked Robert if I knew that the family had found Lewis, too, and asked me to tell him what I had been doing since I had left Cohoes. I had just begun the story I had prepared when he said, “But this is unfair to Mother,” and dispatched a maid to fetch my grandmother. He told the maid who I was—“Isn’t it amazing?”—but instructed her to tell my grandmother only that someone she would be very pleased to see was waiting for her downstairs.

  Presently, she came in. The years had been harder on her than they had been on my grandfather; she was wizened and hunched, and her cane was very necessary to her. Also, I think her mind had deteriorated, just enough to make her subterfuges transparent. It was evident that she had overridden my grandfather’s instructions to the maid and demanded to know exactly who was downstairs. She recognized me with improbable dispatch and broad acting. “Merciful heavens—can it be?” She opened her mouth and popped her eyes, looked left at Robert and right at my grandfather. “Is it Arabella, my granddaughter? Come to me, my child; a few years earlier I would have hurried to your side, but now I am so frail that I must bid you to come to me.”

  I kissed her, and felt the chill. I was more convinced than ever that the reason my brother and I had been sent to live with strangers in the darkest hour of our lives twelve years earlier was that my grandmother had not wanted the noise and worry of young children underfoot; consumption’s disdain of country air had been a convenient pretext. You’ll think it wrong of me to resent it, when I had only just left my son, Frank, in the same place. I see your point, I guess.

  EARLIER IN THE WEEK, I HAD MOVED some of my belongings into the apartment of Ann Dunlop, who lived with two other women above a dress shop she owned. For a fee, Miss Dunlop agreed to pretend that I owned the store, giving a semblance of reality to the story I was telling about myself. Soon Robert and my grandfather visited. I showed them the shop. I showed them where I lived: the apartment, neat and clean, but rather cramped for four women, created an effective impression of honest spinsterhood.

  As soon as they left, I went back to the house on Mercer Street, where I still in fact resided in order to keep a close eye on my affairs.

  At a series of dinners at my grandfather’s house, over the course of several weeks, I was reacquainted with the family and brought into my grandfather’s social circle. For the first of these, Lewis was brought down from school, and the two of us acted out our conception of the emotions we should have felt on meeting again after a four-year separation. At this dinner and subsequent ones, I met several of my grandfather’s business and political allies. Some of them were staying to eat, some were leaving as I arrived, for my grandfather had become busy with politics. He received letters from people who were famous at the time and are in the history books today, and at one of these dinners I met both William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, and the dusky pastor of New York City’s Abyssinian Presbyterian Church.

  It was at the second of these meetings that Robert took my arm and said, “He got Arthur Heywood to come, the Courier editor. Remember I used to read it to you, about the steamship disasters, though I wasn’t supposed to?”

  “Yes, I remember.” I felt dizzy; my face was burning, and my feet were very far away from me. I wondered if I ought to plead a sudden illness. “Isn’t he a Democrat?”

  “Yes, but Grandfather hopes to make him a Free-Soiler, at least when it comes to California.” In a lower voice, Robert added, “Be prepared, Heywood’s not far above the majority of his readers; the wife is a little more refined.”

  I could feel my pulse in my face, so frightened was I, but I determined to brazen it out. His wife was here. Even if she hadn’t been here, he would have wanted to keep his relationship with a whore a secret. Each of us had something to lose. On the other hand, the story that Solomon Godwin’s daughter was a parlor-house madam—what a wonderful story for a Democratic newspaper.

  “Jonathan Wheeler is here,” Robert added, as we walked up the stairs and into the dining room. “You remember we mentioned Mr. Wheeler?”

  “The young Presbyterian minister.”

  “That’s right.”

  “With his fiancée?”

  Robert didn’t answer.

  I had waited impatiently through three evenings with my grandfather before he had finally gotten around to mentioning his work as the chairman of the California Missionary Committee and their search for a suitable young couple to send west to minister to the miners. The committee was determined to send a man and his wife. By all reports, good Christian women were so rare in the gold regions that they were accorded a respect scarcely short of worship. A wife would not only be a comfort to the missionary but multiply his effectiveness tenfold. But of the candidates they had interviewed so far, one married couple was too old for the journey and not terribly keen. Another, though young and zealous, were a pair of Methodists, and the committee was lukewarm on this sect. Finally, there was Jonathan Wheeler, a recent seminary graduate, young, ardent, a Presbyterian, but, unfortunately, a bachelor.

  “What a coincidence,” I had said, and I added that when I was back in Livy, placing an orphan there for the Female Reform Society, I had learned that my cousin Agnes and her fiancé, Jeptha, a seminary-trained clergyman, were determined to go to California as missionaries, and were trying to raise money for the trip. I didn’t know their address, but perhaps my aunt Agatha would. My grandfather said he would write to Agatha.

  He then asked what religion they were; when I said “Baptists,” his enthusiasm waned a little, but he said he would contact them; perhaps they would do if Mr. Wheeler failed to find a wife. But he ra
ther thought he would. Mr. Wheeler was a handsome man, and my grandfather had a woman in mind for him.

  AS ROBERT BROUGHT ME IN, the men who were standing bowed and the men who were seated rose. Most of them were members of the California Missionary Committee, important, established men, variously equipped with bushy eyebrows, nostril hairs, bald spots, double chins, wattles, warts, and crow’s feet. Except for Edward and Robert, only one man was young, so he had to be Jonathan Wheeler: tall, with a Roman nose, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a clean suit that fit as if he had borrowed it for the evening from a smaller, less impecunious friend. He was very stiff, and became even more nervous when he saw me, and suddenly I understood that the woman my grandfather had in mind for Wheeler was me. It was very good news, really.

  Arthur Heywood, who had been eating an hors d’oeuvre when he saw me, stopped chewing with the soft mass still in his mouth. I was introduced here and there, taking their hands. By the time I got to him, he had swallowed without mishap, and was composed, though with an almost imperceptible look of disbelief in his eye.

  By then I felt comfortable enough to say, “You look familiar to me, Mr. Heywood. I wonder if we have crossed paths sometime, on a steamboat or a horsecar, some place where newspaper editors may encounter their readers in the flesh.”

  His tuberous nose crimsoned, and his smile reproached me for teasing him, and he bowed.

  We had met in the forest, dancing with Satan, and had to keep each other’s secret.

  Later in the evening, when we were near to each other and no one else was by, Heywood said, “Have pity. Say you are who I think you are.”

  “I am.”

  “And an impostor? Or …?”

  An impostor. That had not occurred to me—that he might wonder if I were pretending to be a girl who had disappeared, last seen here when she was a child. The idea was no stranger than the truth. “Well, I’m not exactly what they think I am, but I’m Arabella Godwin. I began as Arabella Godwin. How is Philip getting on?”