Belle Cora Page 6

  Wanting to fend off bad luck by being very good, and useful, I added wood to the kitchen fire and started a batch of biscuits. I had just learned how to make them.

  Lewis came in and asked me, “Is the fire still burning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When can I see the fire?”

  “I don’t know. Mama is sick, Lewis.”

  Christina appeared in the doorway. “I’m making breakfast,” I explained.

  “Good,” she said. “Good. Make breakfast. I go. I bring doctor.”

  “Oh no,” I said. A doctor meant it was serious. “Oh no.”

  When I had finished making breakfast, I called out to Lewis to come into the kitchen, but he didn’t answer, and I went to look for him. With increasing panic I searched downstairs, upstairs, in the attic, the backyard, and the street. I searched the house again, this time walking into my parents’ room to see if he was with my mother.

  She was in bed. Her chest heaved in shuddering breaths that seemed to require all her concentration. When I came in she opened her eyes. “What is it, Arabella?”

  “I was calling Lewis for breakfast, Mama,” I said.

  She nodded slowly.

  “May I bring you some biscuits and toast?” I asked her.

  “No, thank you, Arabella.”

  LEWIS HAD GONE TO SEE THE FIRE; I was sure of it. On a piece of wrapping paper, I wrote a note saying that I was going to look for him; I pinned it under a candlestick on the kitchen table. I clothed myself in two of everything except my coat, into the pockets of which, wrapped in newspaper, I put the biscuits, and I went out to follow my poor foolish brother to the docks in weather so cold it had frozen every cistern and well in the city.

  I wrapped my scarf around my face and walked, sometimes into the wind, over patches of dirty snow, frozen puddles, and frozen dung. Cloudy icicles as thick as a man’s arm clung to the railings and shutters. Above the roofs, smoke from small, regularly spaced chimneys rose in groups of three, and a much larger column of smoke loomed beyond the houses, like the giant mother of those smaller plumes. The smoke told me where to walk.

  Much sooner than I had expected, I stood among the charred ruins and knots of people guarding their belongings. The fire had stopped only a few long blocks from our house. Whenever the smoke cleared, it exhibited the shocking fact that the river was in plain sight because there were no longer any buildings to interrupt the view. It was as if the whole world had been put to the torch. Here and there a jagged, blackened section of a wall or a marble façade stood before piles containing all the nonflammable contents of the building, which had fallen through its wooden floors. Stacks of rescued goods rose higher than my head. Some were piled neatly in bales and boxes, some strewn helter-skelter. More than once I mistook some bundle on the sidewalk for the frozen body of my brother.

  “Lewis!” I called out. “Lewis! Lewis, where are you?”

  Iron wheels rattled on paving bricks. Bosses shouted out orders to the clerks and the laboring men. I asked men in black silk hats and capes, men in uniforms, and men who sat exhausted on the curb if they had seen a five-year-old boy with brown hair. They said yes. They had seen dozens of them.

  In the street beside the smoldering ruins of a warehouse, its exterior reduced to a staring door insanely offering passage through a triangular shard of wall, I came upon some grizzled old-timers, with ripped, soiled clothing, warming themselves by a sweet-smelling fire, a tame fire, a pet fire, which they lovingly fed with morsels of wood from broken crates. “Have you seen a five-year-old boy?”

  “Aye,” said one of them. “Some.” Since he said “aye” for “yes,” I decided he must be a sailor.

  I asked, “Did you see one about this tall?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Are you cold? Come and warm yourself.”

  I was shivering, so I accepted the invitation. There were two other men, dressed in tattered coats, with dirty rags stuffed into the collars and sleeves, and rags wrapped around their wrists and the knuckles of their raw hands. A broken crate had been sacrificed to the fire. Its corners glowed orange, and the stenciled words CODDINGTON & BARROW HYSON TEA transiently swelled and shrank and shimmied in the flames.

  “He has red mittens,” I remembered. “Did you see a boy with red mittens?”

  “Follow me,” said the man. He took my hand and started walking. He was taller and younger than he had seemed a moment earlier, but very unprepossessing, with a scraggly beard, and purple bruises on his face—he fought; low people got in fights—and his tight grip hurt my hand. He scared me, but though I might with a sudden effort have pulled away, and I could certainly have screamed for help, I didn’t. I was too worried about Lewis to pay much attention to my own safety. Nothing very bad had ever happened to me, and whatever else he may have been, this stranger was a grown man with a grown man’s resources.

  “Where are you going, Bill?” called out one of the man’s companions.

  “To look for the lost boy,” answered the man holding my hand—Bill—and then, very oddly, he asked me: “Is he your son?”

  “How can he be my son? I’m a child.”

  “Is that so? How old?”

  “Seven and a half.”

  “A smart little girl?”

  “I have been called so.”

  “Do you read?”

  “Yes.”

  “That must be why they call you smart. What’s the boy’s name?”

  “Lewis,” I answered, and I called out, “Lewis! Lewis! Do you hear me, Lewis? Where are you, Lewis?”

  “Let me call him,” said Bill. “Lewis. Lewis. Come, Lewis. Come here, Lewis.”

  He was joking, I supposed, because he called very quietly, almost in a whisper.

  “He can’t hear you. You must shout,” I said. “Lewis! Lewis!”

  Some barrels of raw sugar had spilled out, and a few small children were scooping it into their hands and eating it. We passed a place that had been a bank. Soldiers with rifles stood before it. It did not occur to me until they were far behind us that I might have asked them for help. Anyway, perhaps Bill was helping me. He was either helping me or abducting me.

  “Can you read the small sign on that lamppost?” Bill inquired.

  “It says Wall Street,” I answered.

  “Does it? So that’s what it was saying all this time.”

  There was no way to distinguish street from curb. I stumbled, and he picked me up and carried me in his arms, squeezing my thigh through my trousers.

  He had carried me to the wharves, where stacks of stovepipe hats, barrels of rum and coffee beans, crates of pepper, heaps of silks and tweeds and calicos and chests of teas had temporarily melted the East River ice, which now tightly gripped it all and slowly bore it all away. A little farther, there was smoke, and I coughed. I knew there was something wrong with him, though I could not have told you exactly what it was, and I was becoming alarmed. In my innocence, the range of bad fates that I imagined befalling me were limited: I was afraid he would throw me into the river or the fire or enslave me, making me into one of the poor little girls I had been told of who sold hot corn or swept street corners for pennies that they brought home to their unimaginable fathers.

  “B-B-Bill,” I said, stuttering from cold rather than from fear, though I was scared enough. “M-my grandfather and my father hand out B-B-Bibles. On South Street and in the F-Five P-Points.” I am not sure why I said this: I suppose to make him know that my family was a friend to those living in darkness—to people like him—and he should consider this before he threw me into the river. “M-maybe you have met them, Bill. My grandfather is Solomon G-Godwin, the silk importer. He has a store and warehouse on P-Pearl Street.”

  “Not no more he don’t.”

  He walked to Pearl Street and stood before the remnants of a sign on half a charred wall: SO__MO__ GO__W__. Boys were poking the embers with sticks.

  “Lewis!” I shouted. “That’s him! Put me down!”

  “Hel
p me, Arabella,” said Lewis, as if we were home and I had just come in from the next room. He was trying to work a brass-tipped cane from the embers.

  “P-put me down,” I commanded Bill.

  “Did I find your brother for you?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “And you’re grateful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you know how to show gratitude?”

  “I’ll tell my papa. My papa will give you something.”

  “Your papa? No. Something from you.”

  We were bargaining. I understood that. But what could he want from me? I had in my room some pennies, and dimes, one English shilling, books, toys, a collection of seashells; I knew he would not trust me to go home and come back with them. I had my scarf; I was unwilling to surrender it in this cold. I had biscuits in my pockets. I decided I would offer them to him, but I thought it prudent to ask first, “What do you want?”

  “Give me a kiss.”

  Well, that cost nothing, and it was not even the first time I had made this exchange; perfectly respectable strangers, after telling me how pretty I was, had often solicited my kisses, and once I had kissed a store clerk who had afterward given me a penny, and Christina had reminded me to thank him. So now I cooperated readily; my lips grazed the sandpapery whiskers of his filthy cheek. “Not like that,” he said. Gripping the back of my head with his free hand, he kissed me on the mouth, while the hand that held me from below clutched a place on my body that seemed unnecessary to the task of holding me aloft. It was as foul a surprise as you would expect it to be; and I leave you to decide, knowing what ultimately became of me, whether this strange man saw or in some mysterious way influenced my future, or whether, as I believe, it only seemed so later because of the events which I shall relate in their proper order.

  At any rate, he put me down, and then I was wiping my mouth with one hand and grabbing Lewis with the other. “Lewis, we sh-shouldn’t be out. We have to get home.”

  “In a minute,” he said. “Help me.”

  “Nanaowowow!” I demanded. The word was elongated by my shivers, as in a game we used to play when I would shake him while he said his name and it would come out “Lllllllloooooooo-iiiiiii-sssssss”; but the cold was our rough playmate now. There was no feeling in my fingertips, and I considered it very strange to stand surrounded by embers and worry that we might freeze before we reached our home.

  “Help me,” said Lewis. He meant help him get at his loot.

  “Will you come with me when you have the cane?” I asked.

  After a hesitation, he said, “Y-y-yes.” He was shivering, too.

  The cane, half buried under assorted office furniture, had a curved brass handle in the shape of a snake’s head. It was the handle he wanted. I stepped tentatively on the cane. Then I stepped on it harder. Within a puff of fine ash, which expanded slowly in the air for a long time afterward, the cane snapped near the handle. I stepped again, and it broke off completely. Lewis stuffed it into a pocket already bulging and sagging with other loot.

  He was trembling with the cold, and I pulled him close to me as we walked home. He told me his head hurt and asked me to pick him up. I told him that I didn’t feel well either. I, too, had a headache, and I was tired. I remembered that we had missed breakfast. So we stopped to warm ourselves by the heat of a burning house, and ate cold biscuits, though neither of us was hungry.

  When we reached our street I saw the doctor’s carriage waiting by the black iron fence. I banged the knocker until the door opened, and Christina pulled us into the house, touching our heads and our cheeks, exclaiming over the dirt and soot that covered us.

  “How is Mama?” I asked.

  Christina had a careful, emphatic way of imparting information, staring into your eyes, as if she meant you to memorize her words. “The doctor is with your mama.”

  I started to go upstairs to see her, but Christina insisted on cleaning us up at a basin in the kitchen first. “How you both shiver!”

  Christina helped us up the stairs. As we reached the landing, the boards creaked to announce the approach of Dr. Boyle, whose name had been spoken so often in our house that it had been among my first words. He was tall and stout, well dressed, ruddy, a model of health and good appetite for his patients to imitate. “So these are the young fugitives!” He beamed down at us benevolently.

  Lewis began to vomit. Dr. Boyle stepped away to save his boots. He did it deftly, and with no change of expression, as if he had been expecting Lewis to vomit and it was, medically, a good sign. Then he became interested in the vomit. He sat us both on the steps. He looked at his watch while holding Lewis’s wrist and feeling his forehead. Then he did the same for me and told Christina to put us to bed.

  I lay beneath many blankets, shivering, half awake, and distantly aware of Christina undressing Lewis.

  I dreamed of the blackened streets, the treasure drifting downriver, the smoldering ruins behind the marble pillars of the Exchange, and an angel, who with one arm wielded a sword he pointed north, east, south, and west, and with the other arm carried me safely through the air across the burning world. Worried faces surrounded me. I spat up into a bowl. Christina fed me beef broth, which I promptly spewed onto my nightshirt. My coughs carved deeper and wider spaces within my chest as if bent on hollowing me out completely. It occurred to me that I might die before my mother.

  Later, using all my strength, I turned my head slowly to watch Dr. Boyle hold a candle with which he was setting bits of paper alight on Lewis’s chest. He covered the paper with a wineglass. Then Dr. Boyle was holding a lancet. Lewis’s blood dripped into a white china basin. With another slice of the lancet, the blood flowed.

  Frank was brought in. He was sick, too. We were fed, cupped, bled, and purged.

  When I was conscious once more, the other beds in the room were empty, and my mother was stroking my hair. That she was alive was wonderful, and her touch was a comfort to me; yet I knew that something terrible had happened. “What is it?” I asked weakly. “What?”

  “Don’t talk,” she said, her eyes brimming.

  Next I was sitting up in bed, eating Irish potatoes. Christina was there with my mother.

  “Who?” I asked. My mother turned away.

  “Your brother Frank is in heaven,” said Christina.

  IV

  IT WAS NEVER DETERMINED WHAT HAD CAUSED our general attack of “fever,” as Dr. Boyle called it. The suspects were bad food—maybe an inferior ham that Sally had purchased, which we had finished off the night of the fire—and bad air from an open drain. No one said the word “infection.” I suppose there were doctors who thought that illnesses were contagious, but they were backward or foreign; Dr. Boyle was not one of them. He believed in ventilation.

  I had a lingering bronchitis afterward, and for months I was obliged to spend several hours each day in bed or sitting in a chair. I passed the time reading books. I read The Fairchild Family twice. I read Genesis in the family’s big picture Bible. Robert began reading Robinson Crusoe aloud to me, and when he wasn’t there, I went on by myself. It was much harder than the Bible or The Fairchild Family. I remember how the last page looked, down to a little pea-soup stain, on the day I finished it, and that at first no one believed that a seven-and-a-half-year-old child had really read such a grown-up book. Eventually, I was given Frank’s books.

  MY GRANDFATHER WAS WELL KNOWN by this time as the abolitionist merchant who helped to found an antislavery newspaper, and who had the minister of the Abyssinian Presbyterian Church as a guest at his table. Today it is believed that all Northerners were foes of slavery, but in fact the cause dearest to my grandfather’s heart was unpopular in New York City, where many people depended for their livelihood on trade with the South. New York insurance companies had refused to take his money, and he had used a Boston firm instead; this worked to his advantage after the fire, because the New York insurers went bankrupt, and my grandfather had more capital than his competitors did during
the period of rebuilding. By the following year, fifteen months after the fire, a new store and warehouse had arisen, seven stories high, the tallest edifice in the city of New York.

  I have alluded to this building earlier. I heard that phrase, “the tallest building in the city,” on the lips of every member of my family very often from the time we knew that that’s what it would be. We bragged to the other schoolchildren about it. I walked down the street with Lewis’s hand in mine and told him that he was a lucky boy since his grandfather owned the tallest building in New York.

  One day soon after it had risen to its full height, the family, all excepting my mother, made a visit to stand on the roof of the warehouse and enjoy its immensity. All around us, the grays and browns of the waterfront were replaced by the tawny hues of raw wood, and the air smelled of paint, bricks, and sawdust.

  We were all panting by the time we reached the top, and as we stepped out onto the flat roof, I gripped Lewis’s sweaty, slippery hand tightly. He had recently voiced the alarming opinion that a person who wished hard enough, with perfect faith, might learn to fly.

  We had lived all our lives on flat land in the city, with occasional excursions to the farms of Brooklyn and New Jersey, so we were very impressed by the view from seven flights up. We could see the ships on the river, and more buildings, streets, wagons, carriages, horsecars, omnibuses, and people than our eyes had ever beheld at once. We noticed the fire’s legacy in the broad swath of the city—like the track of God’s paint-brush—where everything was new. Humpbacked clouds cast shadows on neighborhoods in sun and neighborhoods in rain. We found our house.